Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

This article summarizes lessons learned, as well as recommendations going forward for foundations, government agencies, individual philanthropists, and others providing resources to support the arts. A subsequently published piece contains further recommendations aimed at people who commission and/or conduct arts research.

For the past three years and change, Createquity’s mission has been to research “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.” During that time, in networking meetings with potential donors or friends of the organization, I would often get questions along the lines of, “so what are the most important issues in the arts?” Or people might ask for advice on where a donor should give if she were interested in making the most impact in the field. For a long time, I resisted answering these kinds of questions directly, because Createquity’s approach involved deeply investigating a wide range of potential issues before coming to firm conclusions about which ones might be most deserving of our attention, or what kinds of actions we might want to advocate for. Now, however, with Createquity having announced its intention to cease operations at the end of 2017, the time has come to share what we do know – even if there are still significant gaps in that knowledge – and what we think it means for those trying to improve people’s lives through the arts.

Please note: the analysis that follows is a hybrid of formal evidence review, informed opinion based on our collective firsthand experiences working in the field, and logical inference. While we have tried to make it as clear as possible throughout, we welcome questions about what is (and isn’t) backing up specific assertions, and will respond to them in the comments as they come in.

Consider Your Funding from an Ecosystem Perspective

From the very beginning, Createquity has advocated for an ecosystem-level view in arts funding. We’ve actually gone so far as to write out a detailed definition of what a healthy arts ecosystem looks like in practice.

Okay, that sounds nice, but what does it actually mean? Think about it like this. An ecosystem is kind of like a big theatrical production. There are a bunch of different roles to be played, and effective casting in those roles is crucial to giving the audience a good show. Right?

So, the huge difference between a theatrical production and the arts ecosystem is that there is no director making those casting decisions. A bunch of people just walk up to the stage, pick a part they want to play, and go to it. Some of those people might be better suited to playing a different role than the one they chose. In some cases there are two (or more) people duplicating the same part, and constantly stepping on each other’s toes. Another actor might play a role brilliantly, but disappear for the second half, or refuse to share the stage with anyone else. It’s all just a big uncoordinated mess.

Our only hope of bringing some order to this chaos is to recognize that, whenever we design strategy for a new program or redesign an old program, we’re casting ourselves in one of these roles. And it might seem obvious to say, but I’ll say it anyway since it’s so important: when designing the role we want to play, we must ask ourselves, who else is in the cast? What are the roles that aren’t currently being covered? And which of those roles am I or my organization best suited for?

I want to specifically call out that, in my experience, the highest-leverage decision points are often the ones least likely to receive this level of scrutiny. Sure, you may have set up a committee or commissioned an external consultant to decide how to refine and move forward on some specific program that you piloted last year. But how much due diligence went into deciding why your organization exists at all? Its geographic focus and target population? The originating logic behind its flagship initiatives?

People are fond of calling for more leadership in the arts sector. But the thing about an ecosystem is that it is fundamentally leaderless. Which means that we all have to be leaders if any leadership is going to happen. And to me, in the context of grantmaking, that means all of us taking the time to thoroughly understand the arts funding landscape before deciding what role is most appropriate for us to play.

A good rule of thumb is to start with the premise that every other funder is not doing this – in other words, that every other funder is less strategic than you. That flies in the face of the philosophy of humble servant leadership that we’re taught to model in philanthropy. Even so, I would argue that it is a useful working assumption, because if you believe it, then you must believe that it is your responsibility to be the actor in the ecosystem who fills the gaps, who does what needs to be done and what no one else is willing to do. It is up to you to find out what what is needed and neglected, and prioritize that over what might get the best press or the fanciest gala tickets.

And the reality is that my assertion above is likely to be more true than not for anybody reading this. The majority of philanthropic contributions to the arts comes from individual donors, most of whom have a very transactional relationship with specific charities they support and who are notoriously difficult to organize as a constituency. A landmark study of donor motivations commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation concluded that only 16% of individual major donors are motivated by impact, and only 4% consider the effectiveness of an organization the “key driver” of a gift; I would guess that these numbers are even lower for arts donors. Another fifth or so of arts philanthropy comes from corporations, many of which are motivated less by the mission outcomes achieved by grantees and sponsorship recipients than by the benefits those relationships can offer to the brand.

The overarching lesson to take from all of this is that it’s crucial to conceive of arts philanthropy broadly. Resist the temptation to overspecify the solution before you truly understand the problem. We see a lot of programs, especially at organizations that give out smaller-sized grants, that have tons of restrictions on what can be funded, for how long, how the money must be spent, etc. While there may be reasons (like internal capacity constraints) that justify these decisions from the perspective of the granting organization, at a system-wide level this practice results in intractable gaps in the funding landscape and strongly distorts incentives for prospective grantees. Wherever possible, we recommend pushing for the maximum level of flexibility that your donor or ultimate stakeholder is comfortable with – and if the donor/stakeholder is you, pushing yourself to be as clear as possible about the outcomes you’re interested in while being as open-minded as possible about the pathways to accomplishing them.

Regardless of the more specific advice below, this is the most important. Take the time to understand how your work fits into the overall landscape of needs and opportunities in the sector. An eager audience is depending on you to do it.

Don’t Put Your Name on That Fancy Building

Several years ago, the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer made a splash in the arts community by writing a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Good Charity, Bad Charity,” which compared the merits of donating to help construct a new museum wing and donating to an organization fighting a disease that can cause blindness in the developing world. Whipping together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis, Singer wrote, “a donation to prevent trachoma offers at least 10 times the value of giving to the museum,” adding, “the answer is clear enough.”

Predictably, the arts blogosphere kind of freaked out, writing response after response defending or deflecting the practice of giving to the arts while characterizing Singer’s argument as “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” It turns out that Singer’s piece was part of a broader outreach effort on behalf of a movement called effective altruism, which is devoted to the idea of figuring out how to do the most good with the money and resources available to you. Effective altruists believe that answering such questions involves hard tradeoffs, and necessitates a discipline called “cause prioritization” at the very highest strategic level. Not surprisingly, the arts often serve as a convenient example for effective altruists of the sort of “bad” philanthropy to be avoided in favor of higher-potential giving opportunities.

Our instincts may tell us to get upset about this, but the reality is that museum wings are easy targets for effective altruists for a reason. There is an argument to be made that capital investments in fancy buildings are the single worst category of arts philanthropy there is, and may be among the most wasteful uses of (non-fraudulent) philanthropy in general.

How so? First of all, capital projects are enormously expensive. According to “Set in Stone: Building America’s New Generation of Arts Facilities, 1994-2008,” the most comprehensive review of the data on capital construction in the arts that we know of, the average cost of a building constructed by or for a nonprofit arts organization around the turn of the millennium was at least $21 million in 2005 dollars (equivalent to $26 million in 2017). At the extremes, a single project can cost as much as hundreds of millions of dollars, more than the entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Each year, arts organizations spend upwards of $1 billion on such campaigns, with most of that money coming from private philanthropy. Foundations devoted at least 10% and possibly as much as 38% of their arts budgets to capital projects in 2014, according to figures from the Foundation Center.

One major problem with capital projects sucking up so much donor interest is that they disproportionately benefit wealthy, established organizations presenting European art forms, often smack in the middle of places with very large populations of color. Moreover, artists rarely see a penny of this money; the most immediate beneficiaries of these expenditures are construction companies and their suppliers. Beyond equity concerns, however, capital projects frequently turn out to be bad investments even on their own terms: “Set in Stone” documents numerous cases of projects that failed to meet visitation benchmarks, exceeded expectations for ongoing maintenance costs, and/or ran over budget (by an average of 82% in the case of performing arts centers). The authors “found compelling evidence that the supply of cultural facilities exceeded demand during the years of the building boom … especially when coupled with the number of organizations [they] studied that experienced financial difficulties after completing a building project.”

This is not to say, of course, that every capital investment is a bad idea, or that arts organizations should never build new buildings. But given that buildings often come with ample opportunities to lure individual donors to the table (via naming rights, gala invitations, etc.), it’s even harder to defend institutional grantmakers’ investment in capital projects when there are so many more neglected priorities in the sector.

Where to Put That Money Instead

I’m admittedly biased on this one, but I believe strongly that our field has badly underinvested in knowledge. Annually, according to the Foundation Center figures cited above, just 2% of foundation arts grant dollars and 0.7% of grants go to research and evaluation. If my experience over the past decade is any guide, individual donors add virtually nothing to this total.

Even more concerning than the overall level of spending is the distribution of those resources. Existing research initiatives are heavily weighted toward primary data collection and analysis for specific, one-off projects, and most are limited in scope to a single geographic area, arts discipline, or both. As part of Createquity’s business planning process in 2016, we put together an exploratory graph of arts research initiatives, plotting them by breadth of geographic scope and where they sit on the spectrum between isolated data-gathering and more holistic efforts at building knowledge. You’ll see that, prior to its demise, Createquity stood virtually alone in the sector in focusing on the cumulative construction of knowledge through synthesis and interpretation of existing research – and yet even Createquity’s paltry annual operating budget for this work proved impossible to sustain.

This is a tremendously neglected area of arts funding, and that neglect has real consequences for how we all do our work. There is ample evidence that arts leaders are increasingly overloaded with information and need help making sense of it all. Because our field has not invested in the resources to make it possible to do so, it is likely that every day we are missing out on opportunities to shape the arts ecosystem for the better because we do not understand the evidence that’s already right in front of us. Indeed, the choices we are making may even be causing active harm.

As Createquity’s experience demonstrates, filling this gap and others related to our field’s knowledge infrastructure will require a new will to invest in field-building more generally. One of the persistent structural factors holding back such efforts is the difficulty of engaging individual donors in field-building conversations. Despite their importance to the arts ecosystem generally, in 15 years of working in this field I have yet to encounter a single effective strategy for organizing and communicating to individual donors about field leadership issues. Overall, individual donors represent a tremendous untapped opportunity to increase the arts field’s leadership capacity and overall potential for impact.

Moving on to more programmatic issues, there is a strong case to make that a worthy focus of arts philanthropy is advocacy to restore arts education cuts, especially for underprivileged youth at all age levels. Our judgment on this issue derives from several related observations. First, there is a lot of baseline evidence that arts education is beneficial for children, especially for those who have not yet entered formal schooling. Second, we know that in the United States, arts education cuts have disproportionately fallen on low-income families and black and Latino children. Finally, we have some glimmers of evidence that disadvantaged children benefit disproportionately from exposure to arts education. These factors, combined with the incredibly broad reach of arts education as compared with other types of arts interventions, suggest that evidence-based arts funders will find arts education of great interest. With that said, we should add the caveat that it is an arena already receiving a lot of attention, which may mean that much more work is necessary to create the political conditions for donor impact.

Speaking of evidence, Createquity’s review of the literature on the wellbeing benefits of the arts found that some of the strongest available research indicates that older adults and adults in clinical settings can benefit disproportionately from the arts. Participatory activities like singing, in particular, help to reduce anxiety and depression, improve subjective wellbeing, and even fend off the onset of dementia. And when it comes to attendance, according to the NEA’s research, nearly a quarter of adults aged 55 and older in persistent poor health were interested in going to an exhibit or performance in the past year but were not able to, which is a greater percentage than any other demographic examined in the report. This appears to be a highly neglected focus area; I am not aware of arts programs at any foundations in the United States with more than $1 billion in assets that have older adults or people in hospitals as the primary target audience.

Finally, on a more speculative note, it seems likely that the health of the arts ecosystem in the United States and beyond is more generally tied up with the health of the social safety net in those places. Many of the problems in the arts are reflections of larger issues that affect wide swaths of society. While the details of how they play out in the arts may be unique to the field, we can’t hope to solve them by focusing solely on our sector. When Createquity began developing a formal research agenda three years ago, I assured my colleagues on the editorial team that if our inquiry were to reveal that the most important issue in the arts is not an arts issue at all, they could count on me to make that case. Sure enough, after a decade of closely observing trends and shifts in arts policy, I’m more confident than ever that we are wasting our time if we are not taking society-wide issues like health care, wealth inequality, rapid technological progress, and structural racism into account when we develop arts and culture policy. We would do well to shift our working assumptions such that we believe an issue affecting the arts is not specific to the arts until proven otherwise, and therefore the solution to the issue is likely to live outside the arts as well. How can we work more effectively across issue-area and industry silos to make unified progress on these challenges that affect us all so deeply?

Suggestions for Individual Donors This Holiday Season

Createquity has always focused on the broad strokes of arts policy and philanthropy, and we’ve never positioned ourselves as a source of recommendations for individual charities to support. Still, every once in awhile I get requests to make those recommendations, particularly from people who don’t know the arts field very well and do not have strong existing commitments to specific organizations.

Although our recommendations are not as strongly rooted in evidence as those of, say, GiveWell, we do have a few ideas for donors whose primary area of concern is the United States:

• If you are interested in knowledge-building and field leadership issues in the arts, we recommend supporting Grantmakers in the Arts. GIA is the only entity deeply engaging grantmakers across disciplines, geographies, and sector boundaries, and is therefore best positioned to make strides organizing this constituency for greater impact. GIA has an existing knowledge-building function that we would like to see become significantly more robust. We’ve been pleased to see that the organization has begun engaging more foundation trustees in recent years, as well as more arts grantmakers outside the United States. In addition, it might be a good thing for the field if more individual donors, especially high-net-worth donors, were part of GIA’s revenue base and governing constituency.
• If you are interested in supporting arts education nationally, a donation to the Kennedy Center for the national Turnaround Arts program may not be a bad idea. An evaluation of Turnaround Arts from several years ago offered reasonably promising evidence for the effectiveness of its ambitious model (which uses arts integration as a holistic strategy to “turn around” failing schools), and the program has since expanded considerably. GIA and Americans for the Arts have national arts education advocacy initiatives, though we are not in a position to judge their effectiveness. Arts Education Partnership is a national arts education leadership organization that also has a research database called ArtsEdSearch.
• If you are interested in supporting arts opportunities for older adults or in clinical settings, several organizations in the US and UK have programs with solid evidence behind them, including TimeSlips, Elders Share the Arts, and Sing for Your Life’s Silver Song Clubs.
• If you are interested in supporting organizations in your local area, consider that smaller, grassroots arts organizations, particularly those rooted in communities of color, are more likely to be under-resourced relative to the benefit they are capable of providing. If you are not from the community that leads the organization you’re interested in supporting, however, do your homework first to confirm that your help is wanted before you offer it. Many local communities also have well-regarded arts education initiatives, such as Big Thought in Dallas and Ingenuity, Inc. in Chicago.
• Finally, while not a donation, we strongly suggest supporting ArtsJournal by purchasing a premium email subscription ($28/year) or classified advertising. ArtsJournal is a crucial news aggregation resource that has been the source of more than half the links offered in Createquity’s Twitter feed and monthly Newsroom articles over the past several years. Its content is generated from following hundreds of both mainstream and niche media publications and methodically curating the most relevant and thought-provoking content, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. Information resources like these are notoriously fragile in the digital era, and ArtsJournal is no exception: founder Doug McLennan has seemingly not taken a vacation from it in the ten years that Createquity has existed. Supporting ArtsJournal is a great option in particular for small-dollar donors who are not itemizing their deductions.

As much as we wish we could, we are unfortunately not in a position to make recommendations regarding charities outside of the United States at this time. We would love to see someone else take on that challenge, however!

Parting Thoughts

To be a philanthropist, whether the money is yours or simply has been entrusted to you, is a remarkable privilege in every sense of the word. The world is probably never going to see the day when literally everyone seeking to make the world a better place through the arts does so strategically and wholly without regard to self-interest. But the more we can nudge individuals, organizations, and actions in that direction, the more meaningful all of our work will become.

The magic of knowledge is that it is highly leveragable. What you have just read is a summary of a decade of inquiry into the inner workings and external context of the arts ecosystem. If the insights from that exercise ultimately guide even a mere handful of important decisions by well-placed individuals, it will all have been worth it in the end.

Until then, in this season of holiday generosity, and for many more on the horizon, we wish you happy giving and many happy (impact-adjusted) returns.

Among this illustrious group of organizations celebrating their tenth anniversary this year is a little arts policy think tank you might know as Createquity. On October 26, 2007, a modest post here entitled “Hello, world” promised a simple chronicle of a young artist’s journey through business school, with little hint of the much more meaningful work to come. It’s a big milestone for us, one that we savor with pride. But this particular birthday is also bittersweet, because Createquity will not be joining our decade-old brethren for the next ten years. This year, 2017, will be Createquity’s last.

To understand why we’ve decided to end Createquity’s run, it’s necessary to travel back in time a bit. When we relaunched Createquity as a bona-fide think tank for the arts three years ago, I knew full well that we were plotting an ambitious path rife with pitfalls. We were taking on an insanely complex mission—to review, understand, and synthesize arts research more comprehensively and strategically than anyone had ever attempted before—with hardly any institutional infrastructure or startup financial support.

It was beyond audacious. But we felt strongly that to try and fail would be better than not to try at all. Arts leaders are drowning in information. Every year, governments, foundations, universities, and scientists invest thousands of hours and millions of dollars generating research about critical issues in the sector. But according to a 2016 survey sponsored by the Hewlett and Knight Foundations, nearly 80% of arts administrators have difficulty keeping up with information in the field, and only 5% typically read research reports all the way through. With so many professionals lacking time to fully engage with research or a framework to apply the findings in practice, a huge amount of potential goes to waste.

When Createquity relaunched in 2014, our vision was to facilitate progress towards a better world by compiling, vetting, and interpreting relevant insights from the research literature for people with the ability to make a difference. And in three years, we came a long way toward pulling off that vision. We delivered deeply informed analysis and surprising insights on topics including the benefits of the arts, arts participation patterns, artist careers, cultural equity, and the history of the nonprofit arts sector. Our research-driven features have received tens of thousands of page views—according to figures provided to us by the National Endowment for the Arts, more than the NEA’s own flagship research publications. Most importantly, in my view, we began to create a robust logic for how all of this research could optimally inform leaders’ decisions affecting the health of the arts ecosystem—decisions that affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the United States and beyond.

With the exception of a single six-month stretch, we did all this with less money in our annual budget than what I got paid to stuff envelopes all day in my first-ever arts job. At first, the resource-scarce environment didn’t faze us. Createquity had been a 100% volunteer operation in its previous incarnation, after all, with no budget or legal entity separate from my bank account. We were passionate, we believed in what we were doing, and most of us were employed full-time elsewhere or had other gigs to pay the bills. Sure, money would be nice, but it wasn’t the main point.

But then we started doing the work. And let me tell you, to do this work justice takes time. Hundreds of hours of time for every project we did. Over the past three years we’ve completed seven formal research investigations resulting in ten feature articles. That represents just a small fraction of an expansive research agenda we designed during that same period to help us identify, in a very literal sense, “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.” With team members contributing just a few hours a week on average, getting through that research agenda was slow as molasses and put extraordinary strain on our capacity.

In theory, this is a simple management problem with a simple solution: increase your capacity. Alas, doing so proved to be anything but simple. Both firsthand experience and conversations with media industry experts quickly established that ads, subscriptions, and individual donations (including crowdfunding campaigns) could be a helpful revenue supplement for a niche publication like ours, but far from a core anchor. Providing research or consulting services for hire could have helped pay the bills, but would have run a very high risk of taking us off mission as the unsubsidized work took second fiddle to business realities.

That left grant funding as the obvious answer—obvious not just because it was the only realistic alternative, but also because the funding community is a core audience and beneficiary of Createquity’s research. But the national funding landscape is almost perfectly set up to make a project like Createquity extremely difficult to capitalize. The vast majority of arts funders’ portfolios are restricted to specific geographies, to the point that we found we couldn’t even win grants in our ostensible home of Washington DC because our services were not locally targeted enough. The very few grantmakers that do fund on a national basis typically eschew general operating support and are largely uninterested in supporting grantees indefinitely. These are among the reasons why the arts field has, since the 1980s, dug a formidable graveyard for failed think tank initiatives, some of which have become so buried under the weight of history that I only learned about them for the first time earlier this year.

Even so, our first year out of the gate gave us hope that we might defy the odds. After a successful crowdfunding campaign enabling us to redesign the website and hold our first planning retreat, we quickly staffed up our editorial team, laid out a research agenda, and started reeling in our first funders, culminating in the fall of 2015 when we raised a round of seed investment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a business planning process.

As we’ve written about before, one of the most important outcomes of the business planning exercise was the recommendation to package Createquity’s remaining research investigations into a two-year initiative. To speed up the process and make it more robust, we would outsource the investigations to professional contractors through a competitive process, leaving the Createquity research team to manage the various overlapping projects in centralized fashion. We called it the Synthesis Project, and we expected that following this “surge” of funding to conquer the frontloaded inquiry part of our research agenda, we could shrink Createquity back down to its grassroots form for the follow-through (focusing on advocating specific action steps associated with priority issue areas). That way, we would skirt the challenges of long-term sustainability that had doomed so many knowledge-building initiatives of the past.

We had phone calls and meetings galore, hosted events, shook down every prospect, called in every favor, and deployed every bit of reputational capital we had in our efforts to get the Synthesis Project funded. It wasn’t enough. The planning grant we received from Mellon in 2015 was to be the last new institutional funding to come our way. On top of that, in the past two years, our two largest general operating funders each decided to refocus their portfolios locally, which meant that we no longer fit their guidelines. All in all, keeping Createquity funded at even a basic level in the years ahead was shaping up to be a major ongoing challenge.

Ultimately, we decided that it was better to close up shop than continue to fight what increasingly looked like a losing battle. We are using these final months to make connections across the threads of different investigations we’ve done and articles we’ve written over the years, tie up loose ends, and, as much as we can, tease out what it all means for practice.

Next week, we will be publishing four briefs laying out the insights we’ve gathered on the issue areas of arts participation, cultural equity, arts careers, and the benefits of the arts. Over the next couple of months, we will be polishing up our internal training materials and resources to make it as easy as possible for people in the arts community to carry on aspects of the work we’ve started in their own spaces and in their own names. And in November and December, you can expect to see some parting thoughts from our team to philanthropists and researchers seeking to optimize their investments in the arts in the decade ahead. Our goal in all of this is to activate the latent potential of our work over the past ten years into the most accessible and actionable content possible. The goal, in short, is to go out of business in style.

Our tentative plan is to cease publishing at the end of 2017. After that, the website will stay up in an archival state indefinitely. Of course, if someone decides to make another go at something akin to the Synthesis Project and wants to pick up where we left off, we will do our best to facilitate that.

I want to be clear that I still believe strongly in the mission of Createquity. This announcement comes just two days before the start of the 2017 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, which I’m extremely fortunate to have the honor of attending for the ninth year in a row. My wish for Createquity’s final birthday is for all of my friends and colleagues at that gathering to consider the urgent need for a more efficient, networked, strategic, and meaningful approach to building knowledge in service of improving lives through the arts. Though Createquity’s window of opportunity to bring that vision to life has closed, our experience has only reinforced my faith that doing so is not only possible, but tremendously worthwhile.

Many folks have asked what’s next for me. I’ve begun an independent practice working with philanthropists, investors, and governments to deploy resources for good in the social sector; you can read more about that work here. I also expect to continue writing in 2018 and beyond, though about a different set of topics than covered here, and will share more information about that in a future post. In the meantime, although I will miss the environment of learning and intellectual ferment that Createquity has provided in my life for ten years, I am excited and energized by this opportunity to bring a decade of inquiry and discovery to a graceful and meaningful conclusion. I am grateful to all of you for your role in that journey, and I invite you to join me in being a part of Createquity’s final act.

Cover image: “Dramatic golden sunset” by Cindy del Valle

(Brain) Power Breakfast with Createquity
Monday, August 7, 2017
9:30 – 11:00 AM
Northeastern Crossing
1175 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02120

Northeastern Crossing is easily accessible via the Ruggles MBTA Station. More specific directions to the venue are available here.

The program will include introductory remarks from Createquity, the official presentation of the first-ever winner of the Createquity Arts Research Prize (!!), and a series of lightning presentations summarizing and synthesizing Createquity’s in-depth research on a number of pressing issues in arts and culture. Afterwards, we will host a facilitated discussion inviting audience members to reflect on what we’ve learned about the arts ecosystem, what we still need to know, and how we might go about building that knowledge. Ample time for networking and complimentary coffee and pastries will be provided.

Please RSVP by 8/1.

The event is free with donations encouraged.

“Reflection” by Flickr user Skip

There’s nothing quite like the experience of reading 160+ pages of someone else’s writing and research about an organization you founded. On the first pass, everything is personal: an inconsequential inaccuracy will feel like the gravest of insults, every validation of one’s original thinking is the ultimate ego boost, and the whole thing is a bit like the classic nightmare of performing on stage in your underwear. The second read, once the fight or flight instinct has subsided, is far more revealing. It uncovers what lies at the intersection between your own lived experience and someone else’s dispassionate analysis of how that experience has played out for other people. It shows which of your originating assumptions have connected deeply with your colleagues and your audience, which of them failed to translate, and which have given way to new understandings entirely.

Amazingly, I had two of these experiences in 2016. Reading Julian Bryson’s doctoral dissertation on the history and unique structure of C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, a vocal ensemble I founded back in 2005, was just one. The other, of course, was the final report from Createquity’s organizational planning process, funded generously by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation last fall. That report, completed by Pennsylvania-based InfoCommerce Group, has proved to be a pivotal step for us as we continue Createquity’s journey toward identifying the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.

Last year, I wrote that “the pace of our research process is substantially slower than we’d like it to be….Whether the answer is increased capacity, a smarter workflow, better project management, or some combination of the above, we’re committed to increasing output in 2016.” As it turned out, we were able to make some real progress this year. Our flagship large-scale research investigations resulted in a total of eight in-depth articles, a fourfold increase from last year, covering topics as diverse as the effect of TV watching on wellbeing, the history of the development of the nonprofit arts sector in the United States, the multifaceted definitions of and visions of success for cultural equity, whether lower-income and less-educated artists face disadvantages making a living at their craft, and the state of the research literature demonstrating various benefits of the arts.

All of that hasn’t changed the fact, however, that these research investigations are incredibly difficult for us to take on as a grassroots, bootstrapped organization. I have to admit that I chafe a bit these days when I hear Createquity described as a “blog,” as if sole-author opinion pieces were still our primary product. Back in Createquity’s heyday as a blog, a typical post might have taken us anywhere from three to 15 hours to put together. By contrast, each of the features I linked to above represents hundreds of hours of work, contributed by a networked team of researchers, a lead author, an editor, a designer, and people helping to get the word out. Our virtual, distributed team may number in the double digits, but when you add up all their hours it’s still just the equivalent of one and a half full-time employees. With that kind of capacity, we can only churn out so many of those big features a year, no matter how good our processes are.

That’s a problem, because we still have a lot of research to do before we can make any kind of confident claim about what the most important opportunities to make a difference in the arts might be. For all the ground we’ve covered, we’ve uncovered just a fraction of what we want to know. How do we think about the role of the arts in fostering understanding across political divides? In driving forward social change? Are there disparities of access to the benefits of the arts for people in poor health? What about in rural areas? How about in the developing world? How does the opportunity for and experience of participating in the arts differ between audiences and practicing artists? Across demographics? There’s no good way for us to prioritize among potential interventions (and encourage the field to prioritize along with us) when there’s so much out there that we haven’t yet explored.

Fortunately, our friends at InfoCommerce came up with an innovative way to increase output without sacrificing Createquity’s nimble and flexible organizational structure. The idea involves outsourcing the research investigations we’ve been doing to teams of external contractors, with our editorial team serving a centralized coordinating role. We’ve identified a set of twenty research investigations that we’d like to pursue over the next two years under this model. We’re calling it the Synthesis Project, and we’re really excited about the possibilities. Making it happen, though, will require a dramatic (albeit temporary) increase in our budget, and the planning and fundraising required is easily as consuming for our team as a research investigation. Accordingly, we’ve decided to put new research investigations on hold until we can conduct them under this new structure.

In the meantime, we will maintain an active publishing schedule in the spring, with monthly Newsroom roundups of the top stories in the arts, commentary on current events in the field and their implications, and reviews of the latest and greatest arts research. We are systematizing our process for keeping up with arts research publications, and aim to publish many more research spotlight articles and capsule reviews in 2017. And we have some other cool things up our sleeves that we can’t talk about quite yet, but we promise they’re awesome!

As noted above, we do all of this on a budget that is beyond shoestring. We have people on our team who command hourly consulting fees in the triple digits in their day jobs, but are willing to work with us for barely above minimum wage. We also have (lots of) people who have to turn us down because barely above minimum wage is all we can afford to pay them. We’d love to be able to work with more of the second kind of people, and your donations have a direct impact on that being able to happen.

Despite running almost entirely on contributed income, we don’t believe in pestering our readers with endless funding drives and gimmicky campaigns. We only make one ask a year, and this is it. One of the most alarming developments of 2016 is the extent to which incentives for telling the truth in public have become distorted. Journalism and research are both truth-telling professions, and like artists themselves, it is Createquity’s mission to speak truth to power. In that respect, there’s a strong case to be made that Createquity is one of the most cost-effective investments you can make to support the arts. We are able to get a lot of high-value content that you won’t see elsewhere in front of an influential audience for a tiny amount of money. But in order to do it, we need allies who believe in the power of truth. If you’ve found our work at all valuable or interesting this past year, please consider making a donation to help ensure there will be more of it in the future.

Thank you, and here’s to 2017!

Each year since 2013, Createquity has taken a moment to gather its globally-dispersed editorial team all in one place for an intense session of planning and wonkery. What originated as a half-day meeting for three people in 2013 has mushroomed this year into a 10-person, 2.5-day extravaganza. The 2016 Createquity annual retreat will take place in our nation’s capital, and to celebrate, we’d like to invite you, dear reader, to a free reception on Monday, June 27. What could be better than mingling with your fellow big thinkers in the arts over some tea-cured salmon bites and crudité?

Here are the details:

Createquity Reception
June 27, 6-8pm
Teaism (Penn Quarter)
400 8th St NW
Washington, DC

RSVP by June 24th

Your presence will only enhance an already stimulating and enjoyable event. We hope you will able to join us!

Cover image: reception! by Heather Kaiser

Each of these part-time, remotely based roles is a key member of the Createquity brain trust, working closely with founder and CEO Ian David Moss and taking part in all of our research discussions, debates, and major decisions. We are currently recruiting leaders for our teams in research, editorial, and operations.

• Research Team Leader. Our research team shapes our inquiries about what drives a healthy arts ecosystem. As the team leader, you will be tasked with supervising our rigorous research synthesis investigations that advance our knowledge about the most important issues in the arts.
• Managing Editor. Make sure that our work captures our readers’ imaginations by authoring and editing pieces by a stellar team of writers. This is a highly creative role tasked with bringing research and insights to life for our audience and the field at large.
• Operations Director. Be the detail-driven organizer and master strategist who can ensure our work is moving in the right direction. As the Operations Director, you will play a crucial behind-the-scenes role enabling the growth and smooth operation of this fledgling organization.

Why Apply?

This is a rare opportunity to be part of an ambitious, long-term effort to improve outcomes for everyone involved in or affected by the arts. Benefits of participation include:

• The intellectual challenge of identifying and tackling the thorniest questions facing the sector today
• The opportunity to collaborate with an extraordinarily capable, collegial team from across the United States and beyond
• The satisfaction of participating in an active community of changemakers and knowing that your efforts have genuine potential for impact
• Access to an international audience of arts sector leaders and influencers

How it Works

We’re looking for candidates who are passionate about our core mission to make the the world a better place by better understanding the arts, and who can bring an entrepreneurial attitude and strategic approach to managing our team on a range of projects. On average, you’ll contribute approximately 6-8 hours per week to responsibilities directly related to your team’s area. You will collaborate with other editorial team members on most projects and participate in both full team and committee-based conference calls. We are a virtual organization with team members in multiple timezones, so you must be comfortable working remotely.

Our standard recruitment process has three phases. The first step involves submitting a brief application that will help us determine whether your skills and interests align with our needs. From there, a small number of finalists will complete an assignment designed to simulate the types of activities you would be responsible for as a Createquity editorial team member, along with one or more video interviews. Once that hurdle is passed, new editorial recruits join the team provisionally for an approximately three-month trial or “dating period” that gives both you and us an opportunity to find out if we work well together. If all goes well, you’ll officially join the team in fall 2016 and we’ll publicly announce your participation then.

Getting Started

Please see the full descriptions for each role (linked above) for detailed application requirements and procedures.

Thank you for your interest, and good luck!

Cover image: “Leaders” by thinkpublic via Flickr

“leap” by Flickr user sabrina’s stash.

Loyal Createquity readers,

In  2014, we took a big leap, and you leaped with us. Running a traditional arts blog wasn’t feeling very exciting to us anymore, and we thought it might be getting old for you too. We made a bet that there was a need and an opportunity for a new kind of publication: one with the bold mission of identifying the most important issues in the arts and what we could do about them.

Were we right? I’d say that I have two overarching takeaways thus far. The first is that the need is there. In many ways, 2015 has felt like the year that our field is finally starting to admit its information overload problem. The old models of disseminating knowledge don’t work, and some of the most valuable insights of our time are buried in PDFs that nobody reads. In conversation after conversation I’ve received validation that the need for synthesis, for making sense of it all, for meaning, is a real one—and cultural leaders see it that way even if they don’t immediately associate Createquity with meeting that need. I feel more confident than ever that we’re on to something big.

The second takeaway is that filling that need is a breathtakingly ambitious goal. Making the leap from personal blog to professional publication is hard enough as it is. On top of that, we’ve had to to add a whole new capacity for large-scale research synthesis on top of our existing core competencies—all while maintaining an active publication schedule. We’re pretty sure we’re on the right path, but some days it feels like that path is the length of Siberia and we’re traveling it via Segway.

Here are some of the things that have gone well in 2015:

• Having a definition of a healthy arts ecosystem. If everything were as good as it could be, how would that be different from today? You’d be surprised to know how infrequently that question is even asked in our field, much less answered. And yet how can you design effective programs and policies if you’re not sure what you’re trying to accomplish? I wrote about the lack of consensus on what success in the arts looks like in one of the first substantive posts for this site more than eight years ago, and it’s a theme that’s come up repeatedly ever since. Combined with our emerging understanding of the arts’ role in contributing to individual and collective wellbeing, our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem for the first time offers the potential to bring the disparate schools of thought about the impact of the arts under one roof. For us, it functions as our vision statement, moral compass, and research agenda all in one—and there’s no reason why it couldn’t do that for you too. I’m generally not prone to grandiose statements, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that even if Createquity were to close up shop tomorrow, this document on its own will have been an immense contribution to those following in our wake. Because if we don’t know what kind of future we want, that future is going to be decided for us.
• Our published features. When we relaunched Createquity last October, we decided that our flagship content entree was going to mix the analytical heft of a think tank white paper with the storytelling punch of a New Yorker article. We’re still perfecting the recipe, but our first of these to come out of our test kitchen, May’s “Why Don’t They Come?,” offered a hell of a proof of concept. It broke single-day traffic records for the site five times over, attracted attention from the likes of Marginal Revolution and Public Radio International, and dredged up insights from the research literature that surprised even me. You can keep track of what we’ve learned over at the issue pages for our two editorial content themes, Disparities of Access and Capacity to Create Change.
• Making friends in high places. We invested a lot of time this year in converting the reputational capital that Createquity has built up over the years into tangible support from some of our field’s leading institutions, including the Andrew W. Mellon, Robert W. Deutsch, and Howard Gilman Foundations, Fractured Atlas, MailChimp, and CultureLab (an initiative of WolfBrown). We’re grateful to these pioneers for not only seeing the potential of what we’re trying to do but having faith in our ability to make it happen.
• Our editorial team. It turns out that a lot of people want to be a part of something like this! The selection process for joining Createquity is more competitive than it’s ever been, and I still can’t quite believe it when I tell people that Createquity has a paid editorial team of twelve. We now have coverage of all essential function areas and have the capacity to be resilient in the face of vacations, unexpected departures, etc.

And here’s what’s been more of a challenge:

• The pace of our research process is substantially slower than we’d like it to be. At Createquity’s planning retreat a year and a half ago, we identified six target areas for research investigation; at the rate we’re going, it could take us decades just to get through that initial list. Whether the answer is increased capacity, a smarter workflow, better project management, or some combination of the above, we’re committed to increasing output in 2016, and how best to accomplish that is a major focus of the Mellon-funded planning process that we’re currently undergoing.
• Prioritizing research investigations. How should we choose what to write about and in what order? In an ideal world, we would rank potential topics by importance and then pick the most important ones to cover first. Unfortunately, there’s no surefire way for us to do that since we only learn how important a topic is in the course of researching it. As a result, we don’t yet have a sophisticated way of prioritizing research investigations. We are exploring some advanced techniques that could allow us to make quantitative estimates about how topics compare to each other, but that route poses formidable technical and conceptual challenges that will take time to unravel. In the meantime, we plan to solicit input from all of you on what you see as the most important issues in the arts. Look for an announcement about our latest reader poll in the near future.
• Individual fundraising. We had envisioned a range of revenue streams for Createquity, including sponsorships and donations in addition to grants. If you’ve visited the website in the past year, you’ve no doubt noticed the lovely donation form that appears at the bottom of the homepage and every post. Since October 2014, we’ve received a grand total of one unsolicited donation (thank you Barbara Schaffer Bacon!) in response to that form we were so careful to build into the site design, and a recent appeal to our entire list yielded more unsubscribes than clicks. It’s cool; we get it! We’ve decided to take a more targeted approach with individual fundraising going forward. That said, we know there are some folks out there who plan to contribute to Createquity this holiday season; some of you have even told us so yourselves. For you, I am just going to leave this link right here.

Looking ahead to the new year, we have some exciting things on the horizon. Having learned during the development of “Why Don’t They Come?” that television is the closest thing we have to a national pastime, we’re now looking at the evidence base around TV’s effect on people, with a particular focus on economically disadvantaged adults. As part of an investigation into the history of change in the arts ecosystem in the past 50 years, we’re examining how the nonprofit arts infrastructure came into being, with an eye towards understanding what kinds of change might be possible in the next half century. We’re working on a raft of public programming, including our first podcast collaboration with Fractured Atlas on the topic of effective altruism, Twitter chats, and an in-person speaking event. (Speaking of Twitter, if you’re on it and are not following @createquity, you are seriously missing out.) We have a whole bunch of articles currently in development, including our take on the top 10 arts policy stories of 2015. As always, the best way to stay current on what we have in the works is to follow Createquity Insider, our transparency initiative sharing insights and questions from our research process.

We’re so grateful for your support and attention in 2015, and we look forward to earning it all over again and then some in the new year.

The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation has awarded Createquity a grant of $15,000 over one year. Based in Baltimore, the Deutsch Foundation invests in innovation in the areas of science and technology, arts, media, education and social justice. The grant will support Createquity’s innovative research process, which is noted for its transparency and movement toward action to address the most important issues affecting the arts ecosystem. From a budgetary standpoint, the bulk of Deutsch’s support will go towards expanding our editorial team and increasing honoraria for our editorial team members.

We are particularly excited about this grant because it will help us to bolster the operational model for Createquity at a pivotal moment for the organization. While the passion and free labor of our writers and editors were enough to propel the site forward in its early years, the ambition embedded in Createquity’s new editorial mandate requires a greater degree of investment. The Deutsch Foundation joins the Howard Gilman Foundation and CultureLab as partners helping to build a base of support for our new direction and move Createquity forward.

CultureLab is an online learning environment for the arts and culture sector. Built by WolfBrown, the site is a next-generation “social library” to facilitate the sharing of knowledge among consultants, researchers, students, funders, and practitioners. It features a wealth of arts-related research and information, including case studies of grant-funded projects, research reports, strategic plans, feasibility studies, evaluations, and discussion forums. Through our partnership, Createquity’s capsule reviews — easily digestible analyses of studies and reports we encounter through our core research process — currently posted on Createquity Insider, will be re-published on CultureLab, bringing our investigation of research in the arts and culture sector to a broader audience.

As a component of its 2015 contribution to Fractured Atlas, the Howard Gilman Foundation has generously agreed to commit $5,000 in general operating support to Createquity. As a proponent of robust, innovative, and promising arts organizations, the Gilman Foundation’s support will help make our regular content possible. A lot of work goes into our research, writing, and news sharing behind the scenes, and the Gilman Foundation leaves us better equipped to advance our understanding of research in arts and culture.

We are grateful to CultureLab and the Gilman Foundation for their commitment to our work and look forward to seeing these collaborations unfold!

It’s been four years since our last redesign by the excellent Evan Stein/VANPOP, and much has changed in the world of Createquity, and digital strategy. We’re in need of a new logo, new features for the site, and a refreshed design aesthetic. More details for technical requirements and the proposal process in the RFP, but if you know of a designer/developer with experience adapting WordPress themes, please help us reach out to them this week. We’re looking for a response to the RFP by this Friday, July 18.

We want this redesign to better support our expanded goals for Createquity, as well as your needs, dear reader. Help us help you, and pass on any tips for excellent digital professionals.