Createquity.Createquity.

Around the horn: St. Patty’s edition

Ian David Moss — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:12:56 +0000

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

Over at NewMusicBox, Mark N. Grant has a wonderful history of American Presidents’ and Founding Fathers’ fascination with music and the arts. Did you know that John Quincy Adams studied the flute and Ben Franklin invented a musical instrument?
A bill to legalize crowdsourced investment in startup companies is inching closer to passage in Congress.
Grantmakers in the Arts has officially launched its Arts Education Funders Coalition and hired a lobbying firm to help work on arts education policy.
The California Arts Council is getting serious about its strategy to fund itself through selling a million arts license plates.
Hartford joins the list of cities seeking to increase the share of money that local nonprofit institutions pay in lieu of property taxes, a trend currently sweeping across New England. This could end up becoming an important policy story before all is said and done.

CONFERENCES AND BLOGATHONS

Barry Hessenius and Arlene Goldbard hosted a thought-provoking weeklong series this week on political power and clout in the arts. (The two make for an interesting pairing, as their opening exchange demonstrates.) I also enjoyed Diane Ragsdale’s contribution, and Linda Essig participated in the discussion on her own blog.
Beth Kanter put together a wonderful blog team to cover the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations biannual conference. The avalanche of entries makes me jealous not to be there!
The National Arts Marketing Project Conference wants your session proposals, and they’re especially eager to hear from beyond the usual suspects this time around. Are you up to the challenge?

IN THE FIELD

There’s been a lot of buzz about Pinterest, the new picture-based content-sharing/social media platform. Nina Simon explains how her museum has been using it to document (and share) its internal creative process.
The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre is no more.
Looks like the Napa Valley Symphony is down for the count after the death of its chief donor.

FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY

The Three Masters: a wonderfully succinct Seth Godin rubric especially relevant to artist-entrepreneurs.
Whoo! Phil Buchanan, the fire-throwing president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, doesn’t hold back in this list of “7 habits of highly ineffective foundation boards.”

RESEARCH CORNER

Listen up kids: this casual discussion on the empirical value of the arts to society hosted by Stephen Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics book and blog, is instructive because we don’t typically get to eavesdrop on people who are neither in the arts nor have a particular anti-arts axe to grind talking to each about the kinds of advocacy arguments we typically use. And indeed, what we hear isn’t pretty. Faced with the question of whether “a lack of exposure to the arts can lead to disastrous results for individuals,” Dubner opines,

I have to say that what I have read [on the benefits of arts exposure] isn’t all that convincing. It seems to me a classic area in which correlation is mistaken for cause — i.e., highly productive societies have a lot of creative arts; ergo (some may claim), the arts are a contributor to that high productivity (as opposed to, say, a side benefit that’s generated because of that high productivity).

The (by far) best-rated response comment adds, “I suspect it’s an even simpler correlation: anyone employed in purveying X is pretty sure that X is essential to human flourishing. It’s so obvious that the plethora of research proving it doesn’t even require a cite.”
Americans for the Arts’s Animating Democracy project has a new website bringing together much of its output over the past decade and a half into one place.
The Wallace Foundation has been pumping out the publications recently: the latest edition is a report from a convening of foundation-supported arts groups to share learning about building audiences.
Speaking of GEO, the organization is out with a new study suggesting that grantmakers aren’t walking the walk when it comes to best practices in dealing with grantees.
GiveWell has another takedown of published data involving bogus assumptions. This one isn’t quite as dramatic as the DCP2 debacle, but still serves as a warning that not everything you read on the Internet can be trusted.
A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts details the growing financial pressures on municipal library systems, with Los Angeles and Philadelphia facing particularly severe cutbacks in recent years. Yet usage of libraries is up, and in Philadelphia at least, that’s being driven by computer use, which has increased 80% in half a decade. Makes Bill Gates’s famed technology investments in libraries in the 1990s seem downright prophetic.
For you German readers out there, Maria Davydchyk has a new book examining the transformation of cultural policies in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Tina Mermini takes a look at the UK’s latest stats on private investment in arts and culture in that country.
Also in the UK, Hasan Bakhshi at Britain’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts appears to be leading some breathtakingly daring research on the impact of creative industry policy using randomized controlled trials.
ArtsWave’s Ripple Effect Report is the inspiration for the “world’s first game-sourced movie,” a 10-minute film by digital media company Possible Worldwide that celebrates the beneficial effects of the arts on local neighborhoods in graphic novel style with the help of thousands of user-submitted images.

Wrap-up: SOM Philanthropy Conference (Part I)

Ian David Moss — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:02:00 +0000

On November 16, 2007, I had the pleasure of attending the 3rd Annual Yale School of Management Philanthropy Conference, an ambitious event that included a total of seven panels, three guest speakers, and multiple receptions. The all-volunteer student organizing team did a great job, and I was glad to be involved as the coordinator of one of the panels. The event kicked off with a presentation from Courtney Bourns, director of programs at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Courtney’s talk was excellent, and I was surprised and pleased that much of it resonated with opinions I’ve expressed on this blog and elsewhere. Her main theme was that foundations are most effective when they listen to the organizations they are funding–that is, when they allow the organizations on the ground to be the experts. I see foundations–especially those funding the arts–as being fundamentally in an enabling role, not a controlling one. Overwhelmingly, nonprofits have been clamoring for more general operating support (GOS), more multiyear support, and less restriction on how the money can be used. The first and third of these go hand in hand–general operating, for the non-insiders reading this, basically means the same thing as unrestricted. In practice, most “general operating” grants go to pay for boring things like utility bills and salaries for the development staff, since a nonprofit’s programs are usually paid for by grants that have been awarded for those projects specifically. However, it doesn’t have to be this way–if more foundations were willing to provide GOS, then some of that money could be used to support programs. This would be a wonderful thing for nonprofits because it would allow them to allocate program budgets more flexibly, accommodating actual present-day realities instead of being constrained by projections that may have been made years earlier or under different leadership. The multiyear support is important for the following reason: if you fund an organization year in and year out, but you make them reapply each time, what do you think that does to their development costs? That’s right, they go up. The more time that organization has to spend cultivating, applying for, and reporting on your grant, the more your investment is getting sucked up by overhead. As much as I love them, I’m pretty sure that the mission of most nonprofits is not to provide job opportunities for fundraising professionals. So, the more unnecessary steps the funders can remove from the process, the more efficient their grantmaking will be.

Next up was the panel that I organized, entitled “Funder/Grantee Relationships.” We were joined by five panelists: Kim Healey from the NewAlliance Bank Foundation, Barbara Strauss from Clifford Beers Clinic, Sarah Fabish and Lillian Cruz from the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, and Deb Stewart from the Consultation Center. Beth Daponte, who teaches the Program Evaluation class at SOM, served admirably as moderator. The conversation built upon the themes of Courtney Bourns’s talk, exploring the balance between grantmakers’ and grantseekers’ needs in program evaluation. One issue Healey mentioned was that, as a corporate funder, multiyear grants did not make sense for NewAlliance because the foundation could not necessarily predict its budget from year to year. Nevertheless, the representatives from both funding organizations acknowledged the difficulties an overly complicated evaluation system could produce, for funder as well as grantee (it does no one any good to have stacks of unread reports taking up space in the office). For her part, Barbara Strauss of Clifford Beers said that the evaluation process had improved discipline enormously at her organization. CFGNH adopted a new evaluation system last fall incorporating several levels and methods. Some of the innovations, as I understood them, include asking grantees to evaluate the impact of a grant two to three years afterwards, instead of directly following the period of support; commissioning formal studies evaluating groups of organizations for the purpose of knowledge sharing; and hiring an outside firm to document a grant’s impact while it’s happening. Sarah Fabish added that CFGNH’s evaluation process includes a site visit, an important component that helps identify great projects that may not have looked so good on paper.

While there are many positives to evaluation, Prof. Daponte encouraged the panelists to comment on the pitfalls as well. The main issue mentioned, as before, was capacity. Ms. Cruz allowed that funders are often not so good at determining the cost of a new requirement in their process, and often that cost is paid for by the grantee. Ms. Strauss revealed that her organization simply does not apply to grant opportunities if it knows that the organizational strain will not be worth the potential benefits. (This was also something that I encountered at my last job.) The bottom line, as Deb Stewart put it, is that funders need to decide how they want the staff at the grantee organizations to spend their time. It may not always be possible to have systems that are both appropriate to the scale of the organization and truly state-of-the-art.

Ultimately, the panelists agreed, these tensions and opportunities are best explored in the context of a close and candid funder/grantee relationship. Funders need to be clear about their goals and expectations, while grantees need to feel empowered to speak up when a requirement may be causing more harm than good. When both conditions are achieved, the potential for an optimal solution is enormously increased.

I’ll post part II of the wrap-up, covering the remainder of the conference, in a few days.