• 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.

Is Your Arts Programming Usable? considers the concept of usability testing taken outside of its usual tech- or product-specific milieu. Here’s an excerpt:

At Fractured Atlas, we’re in the process of rolling out a few new technology products that have been in the pipeline for the past year or so. One of these is Artful.ly, which is the hosted version of the ATHENA open-source ticketing and CRM platform that was released earlier this year. Another is a calendar and rental engine add-on to our performing arts space databases in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area that will allow visitors to the site to reserve and pay for space directly online.

For both of these resources, we felt it was important to get feedback from actual users before proceeding with a full launch. So we engaged in a round of what’s called usability testing. Usability testing differs from focus groups in that it involves the observation of participants as they actually use the product. So, rather than have people sit around a room and talk about (for example) how they might react to a new feature or what challenges they face in their daily work, you have people sitting in front of a computer and trying to navigate a website’s capabilities while staff members look over their shoulders and take notes.

Whither the Time Machine? Considering the Counterfactual in Arts Marketing explains why deducing what would have happened if things had gone differently is the central problem of arts research, and offers a couple of examples of how arts marketing can take advantage of control groups.

In a marketing-specific context, counterfactual scenarios come into play when considering alternative strategies aimed at driving sales or conversions. One technique that a number of organizations have used is called A/B testing, which is when two different versions of, say, a newsletter or a website get sent to random segments of your target audience.

Internet technology makes A/B testing relatively painless to execute: in the case of a newsletter, for example, all it requires is a random sorting algorithm in Excel to divide the list in two before sending the slightly different newsletter versions to the lists as you normally would. You could test which design results in more clickthroughs to a specific link or which subject line results in a higher open rate.

By creating an A group and a B group, you are finding a way to test the counterfactual without the use of a time machine to go back and try things a different way. Assuming the groups truly are random and the sample size isn’t tiny, it’s a really great way of getting reliable information on what you’re doing.

A/B testing is not the only way of pursuing this kind of inquiry, however. Sometimes it’s not that easy to simply divide your target audience into two.

Enjoy!

This was a well-done conference. Unlike some that try to pack so many concurrent sessions into the same time slot that each attracts only a handful of attendees, NAMP presented only three conversations at any given time, making for a generous distribution of the 600+ conference participants at each one. The speakers that I saw were, for the most part, highly dynamic and engaging, including the “two Chips” – Heath and Conley – whose keynotes bookended the conference. (My only quibble is that the list was not terribly diverse, a lost opportunity of sorts for a field that is currently fretting about reaching new audiences.) Furthermore, I have to say that Twitter was used far more effectively at this conference than at any other I’ve been to. The usual experience goes something like this: hashtag gets set as an afterthought a few days before the event; the tiny minority of Twitter-savvy attendees robotically report notable quotables from this or that keynote speaker and then all retweet each other; conversation ceases the moment the conference does (if not before). In contrast, NAMP conference organizers set the stage long in advance, choosing a hashtag (#NAMPC10) far in advance, encouraging conference speakers (many of whom, of course, are leading social media experts) to tweet the conference and their sessions as they were announced, and — most importantly — paying for free wifi in the plenary halls/breakout sessions as well as in attendees’ hotel rooms. This allowed even attendees without smartphones or who are less comfortable using Twitter on a phone to participate in the conversation.

The result was that the true potential of Twitter as an alternative back channel – an alternative dimension, almost – for conversation at conferences was on full display at NAMP. The event generated more than 5,000 tweets in four-plus days, and unlike the drip, drip, drip at your typical arts conference, following along this time was a dizzying experience at sessions and social events alike. In several cases, the Twitter chatter became part of the live session experience, both in planned ways like when it was incorporated into the questions asked of keynote speakers or projected onto giant screens during lunch, and in unexpected ways like when panelists reacted in person to comments on Twitter about the session and vice versa. Session feedback was both immediate and decisive, as anyone following the stream could figure out what the “must-attend” events were during a given time slot and which ones were going off the rails. As a panelist, it was actually fairly nerve-wracking to know that anyone in the room could be reporting your words to the world with whatever commentary they liked in real time, but as an attendee it was kind of thrilling.

The conference both generated and inspired media in a number of other formats as well. Portions of the event were recorded and broadcast on livestream.com (a media sponsor for the conference), and three of the videos will remain archived at that link for the next six months. A crew of bloggers typed up a storm about the conference at Americans for the Arts’s ARTSBlog, and a number of interviews (both audio and video) were posted on the NAMP social media page. The coolest byproduct, though, was the series of video blogs from the team at Technology in the Arts, three of whom were in attendance. A real test of endurance, these videos (about half an hour’s worth each night) were filmed, edited, and posted after a full day’s worth of sessions and receptions. Here’s Day 1 and Day 2, the two “full days” of the conference; TiA also put up a NAMP-focused podcast featuring session organizer Ron Evans last week (in which they discuss the above-mentioned Twitter phenomenon), and more are apparently on the way.

So congratulations to NAMP for practicing what it preaches on the social media front. Of course, the big question is whether all this effort made a difference in the bottom line, since that’s the foremost question for many arts organizations when they think about social media (and all the effort it takes to seed a good conversation). We’ll never know for sure, but for what it’s worth this year’s 600 attendees represented a 20% uptick from the previous year — and with a substantially younger attendee base than I usually encounter at arts conferences, to boot. Considering the not-inconsiderable registration fees and the still-lingering effects of the recession, that’s not too shabby.