One of the most gratifying things about this campaign so far has been seeing the wave of support we’ve received from people whose work is central to our field. Barry Hessenius, whose blog is another widely-read resource among arts managers, graced us last week with a completely unsolicited and glowing endorsement of this project:

I hope you will go to the Indiegogo site and support this effort.  I did….I can give you two good reasons why you might part with the cost of a couple of Starbuck’s half caffeine, double mocha, caramel, latte frappacinnos:  First:  Ian and the people he has assembled to help with his newest reinvention of his site are exactly the people we want to support in our field – young, smart, dedicated, committed people who are already making a contribution to the field to help make things better for everyone.  Supporting that alone ought to be worth ten or twenty bucks.  But Second, I can almost guarantee you that if you follow whatever Createquity does over the next year you will read two or more posts that you (you personally) will find of great value to what you are doing on your job.  That ought to be worth a few bucks, no?

And how often do you get to play Santa Claus in July?

Indeed, it’s been amazing to see the movers and shakers who find value in Createquity’s work. Every year, with the help of a pool of nominators, Barry compiles a list of the nonprofit arts sector’s 50 most powerful and influential leaders. More than a fifth of the 2013 list has contributed to our campaign so far. The show of support from our field has been extraordinary, with donations from star consultants like Holly Sidford (Helicon Collaborative), Alan Brown (WolfBrown), Adrian Ellis (AEA), Jerry Yoshitomi (MeaningMatters), Claudia Bach (AdvisArts), and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus (Metris Arts Consulting); arts organization leaders like Adam Huttler (Fractured Atlas), Laura Zucker (LA County Arts Commission), Mara Walker (Americans for the Arts), and Kemi Ilesanmi (The Laundromat Project); current and former foundation leaders like Kerry McCarthy (New York Community Trust), Angelique Power (Joyce Foundation), and Marian Godfrey (ret. Pew Charitable Trusts); and fellow arts thinkers and information mavens Doug McLennan (ArtsJournal), Nina Simon (Museum 2.0), Thomas Cott (You’ve Cott Mail), Andrew Taylor (The Artful Manager), and Diane Ragsdale (Jumper). The latter four have contributed to our campaign in particularly special ways: Thomas, Andrew, and Diane all were kind enough to record video testimonials for us (embedded below), and Nina is donating two rare signed copies of her classic read The Participatory Museum, which are available to donors at the $100 level. Grab ’em fast!

I hope you agree with us that this is a pretty incredible list. Won’t you add your name to it and help us cross the finish line?

diacritical
I didn’t realize until recently that Doug McLennan, the brains behind the ArtsJournal empire, also had a blog of his own. Doug’s continual monitoring of over 200 publications might just make him the most informed individual in the arts, so his perspective is uniquely relevant as a crisis in the profession of journalism itself collides with hard times for the arts more generally.

The Hub Review
Thomas Garvey’s blog was one of my first Twitter discoveries: someone pointed me in the direction of his excellent anti-manifesto on the value-destroying properties of the internet, which is one of the most challenging and thoughtful pieces I’ve read all year. The Hub Review has a Boston focus and basically provides a space for this ex-Globe critic to keep up his craft. Garvey’s writing is professional and very, very prolific.

New Voices of Philanthropy
This promisingly-named blog is run by Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice. As you might imagine, Trista writes mostly about issues of generational change in the social sector, and frequently invites guest bloggers to contribute to the conversation (there was a whole raft of them for the recent Council on Foundations conference in Atlanta). Few things are closer to my heart at the moment than the need for a coherent cross-generational pipeline in philanthropy, so I am very grateful that Trista is leading the charge in that department.

New York Times Arts section
Yeah, you’d kinda think that I would have subscribed to this one by now. Yet surprisingly, I was never a regular reader of the Times arts pages until quite recently, despite their huge importance in driving the national discussion. I simply didn’t feel the need to, what with ArtsJournal and other aggregators picking up the bulk of the good stuff. Some food for thought for what the web is doing to original content generators. I’ve given you the link for everything, but you can filter down by discipline here as well. Better take advantage of it while you still can.

• Who knew, he’s a new music fan! He’s talking about how he was just at the Ojai Music Festival and became totally transfixed by an opera and Steve Reich’s Drumming (strange to think that I have friends who were involved with that performance). Later he name-drops Tan Dun.
• “An America without great performances would be impoverished, no matter what our GNP.” Jim Collins said it, so it must be true, right? I have to hand it to him, he knows how to give a speech. Feels a little like a stump address, but he’s a performer for sure.
• Apparently the #1 performing stock among all publicly traded stocks from 1972-2002 is Southwest Airlines. I suspect this might involve some cherry-picking of dates (what’s the best-performing stock from 1972-2008?), but it’s still surprising given the industry. He’s trying to make the point that choices have more significance than circumstances.
• He says that the answer to the performing arts field’s problems is not to become more like a business. He’s making the point that there’s mediocrity in all fields (yes!) and that just because a practice or habit comes from the corporate world doesn’t mean it’s better. The important difference (as he puts it) is between “good” and “great” and the key factor is a culture of discipline. Momentum takes a long time to build, even for so-called “overnight successes.”
• Hammering home that we each need to think about our own role in this puzzle, not just sit back and say to ourselves, “yeah, we should totally change the way we do things as a field” and then assume that other people will take care of it. Applicable to any desirable social outcome. That said, his insistence on calling us the “performance arts” is a little grating.
• Now saying that concentrated executive power, as we seen in companies, is actually the special case, not the general case. In the social sector and in society at large, it’s much more common to see diffuse power maps in which many parties have enough negative power to kill action. So the most effective leader (a “Level 5” leader in his taxonomy) in the social sector is not the one who can just make the right decisions, but the one who can create the conditions in which the right decisions can happen. In other words, a facilitator more than a despot. Man, maybe I need to read this book.
• Since money is merely a necessary input to the social sector, rather than a signal of success, Collins suggests a hybrid approach to measuring impact in the social sector, particularly in the performing arts. He likens it to a trial: building a case for impact, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative factors. “Thou art guilty of great results!”
• Points out the differences between values and practices. Practices can change, values cannot. As much as traditions are revered, they are not values, they are practices. The challenge is to adapt by changing practices while holding values constant.

Occasional over-the-top motivational speaker moments aside, a good speech and a good session. Later, I attended seven different panels for about fifteen minutes each thanks to NPAC’s inexplicable decision to pack all of the four-day conference’s dozens of breakout sessions into one three-hour period. My divide-and-conquer strategy wasn’t all that successful, since I only caught little bits of each event and couldn’t manage much context from it. The most interesting sessions I saw were “The Not-So Distant Horizon” featuring Artsjournal.com‘s Douglas McLennan and “futurist” David S. McIntosh and “Stop Taking Attendance and Start Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Your Programs” with WolfBrown and officials from the Clarice Smith Center at the University of Maryland. The former attempted to put in one place all of the broad cultural trends affecting the performing arts, while the latter demonstrated a novel approach to measuring emotional and spiritual impact by borrowing techniques from psychological research.