Hey, remember Chase Community Giving? And Pepsi Refresh? And the American Express Members Project?

The social-media-driven, crowd-powered giving initiatives promised to “redefine corporate philanthropy” and were frothily hailed as a “taste of things to come” just a short while ago. American Express had gotten the trend started back in 2007 with the Members Project, a campaign that drew hundreds of thousands of AmEx cardholders to sign up, nominate and vote for recipients of a couple million dollars in grant funds. Chase upped the ante in late 2009, announcing a partnership with Facebook whereby nonprofits would compete for votes via the social media platform. Whoever got the most votes – and, in the process, recruited the most Facebook fans for Chase – could receive grants of up to $250,000. And Pepsi followed in 2010 by famously foregoing its traditional Super Bowl ads, spending the $20 million budget instead on a year’s worth of grants to ideas in six categories (including arts and culture), all of which would be determined by the frantic votes of fans. Shortly afterwards, American Express revamped the Members Project via a new collaboration with TakePart, a social action network linked to the hit documentaries An Inconvenient Truth and Food Inc.

All three of these and similar initiatives sought to use emerging digital technologies to devolve the power of the corporate purse to the populace, ostensibly under the banner of corporate social responsibility (but funded, especially in Pepsi’s case, primarily with marketing dollars). It wasn’t long before such contests made their way into the daily lives of nonprofit administrators, including arts organizations. As far as philanthropic innovation was concerned, it seemed like it was all anyone could talk about.

That was four years ago. If you haven’t heard anything about these initiatives recently, it’s not a coincidence. It’s because they all appear to be dead.

Pepsi Refresh seems to have had the best-attended funeral, with a well-trafficked media news site pointing out that the soda giant “let its much-vaunted social impact initiative…quietly fizzle away” in 2012.

A key factor in this shift? Business realities. While the Pepsi Refresh Project was running, Pepsi had consistently been losing market share and volume, leading to a humiliating drop to lowly third place behind Coke and Diet Coke. Add to that widespread investor pressure on CEO Indra Nooyi to focus on driving core businesses, and the handwriting was on the wall.

Members Project has gone the way of the dodo more quietly. No official announcement could be found on the web about the project’s demise, but the official TakePart website wants no part of the action, and the Facebook page it points to instead hasn’t been updated since April 2012.

Chase Community Giving’s fate is a bit murkier. The brand’s Facebook page is still active, with an impressive 3.7 million fans. But the posted content consists exclusively of fluff such as “Use your Chase debit or credit card to purchase Beyoncé and JAY Z’s #OnTheRunTour benefitting the Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation.” The latest announcement I could find of any actual grants awarded was, again, from 2012 – a year when Chase had received reams of bad press for alleged cheating and unscrupulous behavior on the part of contestants and organizer alike. It seems likely the bank finally decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.

So there you have it. Crowdsourced corporate philanthropy died a year and a half ago, and no one seems to have noticed. What does it mean? Well, to me, it’s a depressing reminder of the tension that exists between corporate philanthropy and corporate goals. Remember, these projects were supposed to be a marketer’s dream, tapping into the idealism and digital savvy of the Obama generation. But either that generation wasn’t that idealistic after all, or the annoyances created by the competition for votes overwhelmed any positive vibes generated by the often modest amounts awarded.

Business school types, at least the kind of folks who were in school with me half a decade ago, really want to believe that profits and virtue go hand in hand – the old “doing well by doing good” mantra. I mean, who wouldn’t love to have your cake and eat it too? Surely such opportunities exist here and there, but if you believe the efficient market hypothesis, if there were vast money-making opportunities involving grants to nonprofits hiding in plain sight, someone would be taking advantage of them already. I suspect that if corporations genuinely care about “doing good” for the world, they’re going to need to separate that agenda out from the profit-maximization mandate, as much as their shareholders might resist. On the plus side, our long national nightmare of annoying solicitations from everyone you know to vote for projects every day for a month seems to be over – for now, at least.

On to the news:

YOU’RE FIRED

• The orchestra world has been shaken to the core this month. The largest institution yet to face such troubles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has filed for bankruptcy (the restructuring kind, not the “we’re throwing in the towel” kind). On the one hand, I am sure that the Fabulous Philadelphians’ financial troubles are very real. On the other, it does strike me as curious not only that (as others have noted) an organization with a $140 million endowment would file for bankruptcy, but that the move precedes the announcement of a $160 million fundraising campaign to save the orchestra. Andrew Taylor digs into the bankruptcy filing docs.
• The Syracuse (NY) Symphony Orchestra has filed for Chapter 7 (we’re throwing in the towel) bankruptcy, after canceling the rest of its season a week earlier. Looks like it’s lights out for this one, not to mention the SSO’s 95 musicians and staff.
• Albuquerque’s New Mexico Symphony has filed for Chapter 7 as well. 80 musicians and staffers will lose their jobs.
• On the plus side, the Detroit Symphony musicians are back to work, albeit six months later. The new three-year contract calls for 25% cuts in salaries (to $79,000 base pay, hardly slave wages) and additional funds available for optional community-service work. The orchestra’s size will be reduced from 96 to 85 musicians.
• The artistically successful but financially troubled Intiman Theatre  in Seattle has cancelled the rest of its season due to money problems. Its artistic director, Kate Whoriskey, has now left as well.
• The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival is kaput after 17 years in operation, making it the second major Baltimore arts organization to fold since the start of the Great Recession (after the Baltimore Opera). The article contains this quote that would make Tyler Cowen smile: “‘We started as a non-Equity company, and if we had dropped our contract, it would have cut our costs,’ Toran said. ‘But that’s exactly what we weren’t going to do. You want to pay your actors, just like you pay lawyers and doctors and teachers. Our goal wasn’t survival at any cost.'” So because they wanted to pay the actors so badly, they decided to give them fewer work opportunities?
• The New York City Opera, two years after spending the 2008-09 season inactive and raiding most of its endowment to stay alive, is facing a possible strike and the delay of its season announcement for next year.
• Pittsburgh arts groups are exploring increased collaboration as a survival strategy.
• Meant to write about this a while ago, but Pepsi Refresh has relaunched with a different process and set of rules after complaints of gaming the system last year.

I QUIT

• Ellen Rudolf is stepping down as longtime director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures Program, which she had initiated with the foundation 17 years ago.
• Jeremy Nowak, a noted advocate for the power of the arts in revitalizing communities, will no longer be the President and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund – for good reason: he’s about to become the new head of the William Penn Foundation. (via GIA News)
• Nina Simon, author, blogger, and museum design consultant extraordinaire, is quitting her consulting and speaking business to be the new Executive Director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA. Thankfully, she is not quitting her blog.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

• Whoa…a donor’s estate in Bermuda is withdrawing an £82 million donation to Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival for no reason at all, apparently.
• Chad Bauman riffs on the recent cuts to DC’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission from a marketer’s perspective.
• Michael Kaiser takes a dim view of the trends in corporate giving to the arts. Here are some numbers from the Foundation Center.
• Americans Gave a Lot Less in the Recession Than Experts Predicted, reads the Chronicle of Philanthropy headline. Among other things, this story is a pretty big black eye for Giving USA, the annual report on individual giving that had estimated that donor activity was holding steady or barely dropping during the same period.
• Meanwhile, foundations gave (slightly) less in 2010 than 2009, despite the fact that their assets increased by 5%.
• Why don’t more foundations publicly explain the rationale behind their gifts?
• It looks like the growth of new 501(c)(3)s has finally slowed (and the numbers will actually drop considerably once the IRS releases the names of the nonprofits whose status it has revoked as a result of nonfiling). Of course, this hasn’t stopped composer Philip Glass from founding a new festival in Carmel Valley, CA.

SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE

• My colleagues at Fractured Atlas have a new publication laying out what the health insurance reform law means for artists.
• A new publication from the Boekman Foundation in Amsterdam: Cultural Policy Update. And check out this fab cultural policy blog salon put together by my friends at Emerging Arts Professionals – San Francisco Bay Area, featuring an admirably diverse range of voices.
• Not surprisingly, the social media cognoscenti are all abuzz about the new report from the Knight Foundation, “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks.” Beth Kanter is all over it here.
• CEOs for Cities reports on the residential clustering patterns of the “young and the restless” – college educated 25-34-year-olds. Seems cities’ “close-in neighborhoods” are more important than ever.
• Partners for Livable Communities reports on strategies for arts organization outreach to senior and immigrant audiences.
• Shannon Litzenberger is back with a massive report on cultural policy in the Windy City.
• Won’t you help Devon with her epic Facebook experiment? (It begins tomorrow.)

SEE YOU IN COURT

• David Byrne has come to a settlement with former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who had used the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” without permission during Crist’s unsuccessful campaign for Senate last year. (Seems a rather auspicious choice, no?) The settlement terms apparently included Charlie recording this apology video, which actually almost makes me feel sorry for him.
• Matthew Guerrieri reports on a dispute between the Music Publishers Association (UK) and the International Music Score Library Project.

BEAUTY CONTESTS

• Bubble sort as demonstrated by Hungarian folk dance.
• Eric Whitacre is back with the Virtual Choir 2.0, this time performing his “Sleep” and featuring over 2000 performers. Sounds great, but fair warning: the video is even cheesier than in the last one.
• To draw in new audiences, an orchestra plays for cows.
• I find a lot of public art less than inspiring, but I have to admit, this is pretty awesome:
  

  After more than a decade of disagreement, Berliners have settled on a monument to celebrate German reunification and the 1989 peaceful revolution: a giant, rocking dish.

  The 55-metre, 330-tonne glittering steel wing can hold up to 1,400 people at any one time, but it needs at least 20 people to get it moving.

  The monument to unity is called Citizens in Motion, and is apparently all about people coming together. If you want to make it move, you have to get a group together and all go in a particular direction.

Image by Flickr user Mordac

(This article originally appeared in 20UNDER40 anthologyⁱ edited by Edward P. Clapp, and has been republished with permission.)

Spurred on by major technological advances, the number of aspiring professional artists in the United States has reached unprecedented levels and will only continue to grow. The arts’ current system of philanthropic support is woefully underequipped to evaluate this explosion of content and nurture its most promising elements—but we believe that the solution to the crisis is sitting right in front of us. Philanthropic institutions, in their efforts to provide stewardship to a thriving arts community, have largely overlooked perhaps the single most valuable resource at their disposal: audience members.

We contend that by harnessing the talents of the arts’ most knowledgeable, committed, and ethical citizens and distributing funds according to the principles of what we have termed guided crowdsourcing, grantmaking institutions can increase public investment in and engagement with the arts, increase the diversity and vibrancy of art accessible to consumers, and ensure a more meritocratic distribution of resources. We envision an online platform by which a foundation may crowdsource philanthropic decisions across a wide-ranging network of aficionados, aspiring critics, artists, and curious minds, bolstering its capacity to give fair consideration to the full range of artistic talent available and ensure that the most promising voices are heard.

* * *

I. Choking on the Fire Hose: The Arts’ Capacity Catastrophe

In 2009, a play I directed off-off-Broadway was one of the best reviewed shows in New York at any level. It got the kind of reception that you’re told means your career will start to take off. The talent pool is so huge and the number of spots for artists so small, though, that even my really well reviewed, lines-around-the-block show doesn’t really help. I got paid $250 for six weeks of work on that show, and I made one connection with [an off-Broadway theatre]. If I am lucky (and that means really lucky, they have a lot of artists who they develop), in 3-5 years they will produce a show of mine. If they do, my pay for whatever mythical show that might be would probably be between three and five thousand dollars, and it would be for a project I had probably been working on and off on for several years. I’m in the process of leaving pursuing professional theatre to only focus on projects I care about because both the financial realities and the lifestyle created by those realities is not one I want to subject myself, my upcoming marriage, or my (a couple years down the road) child to.¹

—Theater Director, age 30

An Embarrassment of Riches

The muse works feverishly in the 21st century. In the United States, more than 2 million working artists identify their primary occupation as an arts job, and another 300,000 or so earn secondary income from the arts.² Yet those numbers only hint at a far bigger phenomenon: the ranks of those who create art, whether or not they earn any money from it, have ballooned to some 20 million adults in 2008.³ Many of those in this latter category fall under the rubric of what Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller have called “Pro-Ams,” serious amateurs and quasi-professionals who “have a strong sense of vocation; use recognized public standards to assess performance; …[and] produce non-commodity products and services” while “spend[ing] a large share of their disposable income supporting their pastimes.”⁴ Thanks to historically inexpensive production and distribution technology, more artistic products can reach more people more easily than ever before: as of January 2009, for example, users were uploading the equivalent of 86,000 full-length movies to YouTube every week.

The human brain—not to mention the human lifespan—simply cannot accommodate a considered appreciation for so many contenders for its attention. Even if a music lover kept his headphones on for every minute of every day for an entire year, he wouldn’t be able to listen to more than an eighth of the 115,000 albums that were released just in the United States in 2008.⁵ Because we do not possess the capacity to give equal time to every artistic product that might come our way, we must rely on shortcuts. We may look for reviews and ratings of the latest movies before we decide which ones we’d like to see. We often let personal relationships guide our decisions about what art we allow into our lives. And we continually rely on the distribution systems through which we experience art—museums, galleries, radio stations, television networks, record labels, publishing houses, etc.—to narrow the field of possibilities for us so that we don’t have to spend all of our energies searching for the next great thing.

Every time we outsource these curatorial faculties to someone else, we are making a rational and perfectly defensible choice. And yet every time we do so, we contribute to a system in which those who have already cornered the market in the attention economy are the only ones in a position to reap its rewards.

The Arts’ Dirty Secret

We regard the market’s lack of capacity to evaluate all the available art as a systemic and rapidly worsening problem in the arts today. Artists take time to learn their craft and capture attention; while the market may support an “up-and-coming” artist to maturity if she is lucky, making the transition to “up-and-coming” requires nurturing that the market will not provide. Before an artist becomes well known, the “market” she encounters is not the market of consumers but rather the market for access to consumers. This market is controlled by a small number of gatekeepers—e.g., agents, journalists, literary managers, venue owners—who each face the same capacity problems described above. Even the most dedicated and hardworking individuals could not possibly keep up with the sheer volume of material demanding to be evaluated.

This tremendous competition for gatekeepers’ attention frequently forces aspiring artists into a position of having to assume considerable financial risk to have even a shot at being noticed. An increasing number are receiving pre-professional training in their work; degrees awarded in the visual and performing arts jumped an astonishing 51% between 1998 and 2007.⁶ Others are starting their own organizations; the number of registered 501(c)(3) arts and culture nonprofits rose 42% in the past ten years.⁷

Yet all of this increased training and activity comes at a steep price, one all too often borne by the artist herself. Master’s degrees at top institutions can set her back as much as $50,000 per year; internships that could provide key industry connections are frequently unpaid. Artists in the field have been known to incur crippling consumer debt in pursuit of their dreams; the award-winning film documentary Spellbound, for example, was made possible because the co-creators maxed out some 14 credit cards to finance production. Indeed, a daunting investment of direct expense and thousands of hours of time not spent earning a living are virtual requirements to develop the portfolio and reputation necessary to translate ability into success. However one defines artistic talent, it is clear that talent alone is not enough to enable an artist to support herself through her work.

It’s not just those with education debt that have a hard time being a full-time artist, but really anyone without a safety net. I know I can count on one hand the number of composers I know in our age bracket whose parents didn’t pay for their undergraduate education (at least the vast majority of it).⁸

—Composer, age 27

If traditional gatekeepers lack the capacity to identify and provide critical early support to artistic entrepreneurs with little pedigree but plenty of potential, there is a real concern that to compete for serious and ongoing recognition in the arts is an entitlement of the already privileged. For a sector of society that often justifies philanthropic and public subsidy by purporting to celebrate diverse voices and build bridges between people who see the world in very different ways, this is a grave problem.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Grantee

Grantmaking institutions have a critical role to play in the market for access. Grants represent a very different kind of support from sales of tickets, stories, or sculptures. They may prove crucial for demonstrating proof-of-concept for a new venture—or simply for the development of a style, portfolio, and audience. Most important, they provide a temporary financial cushion that can allow the artist-entrepreneur to manifest her true vision rather than see it continually undermined by scarcity of equipment, materials, staffing, or time. They can make the difference in production values that ensures a serious reception from critical eyes and ears, and allow the artist an opportunity to use time that might otherwise need to be spent earning income to perfect and promote her work. In short, grants are a seemingly ideal vehicle through which to address the fundamental inequities created by the pinched market for access.

Sonically, anything you do is going to be compared to established artists whose studio budget has more zeros on the end of it than yours. And the sonic quality of the recording itself is often the first thing critics (and listeners) hear and respond to.⁹

—Jazz Musician, age 34

Sadly, the lack of evaluative capacity biases the philanthropic market for the arts just as it skews the commercial market. In a perfect world, foundation and agency employees would have the time and money to find grantees by continually seeking out and experiencing art in its natural habitat. In the real world, a notoriously small number of staffers at a given foundation or panel of experts from the community is often hard pressed simply to review all of the art that comes through the door.

Not surprisingly, then, grantmakers take defensive measures to protect against being overwhelmed by an inundation of requests. First, they explicitly narrow their scope through eligibility restrictions. Nearly half of foundations that support the arts refuse to accept unsolicited applications at all, and even those that do frequently consider applications only for particular art forms, geographic regions, types of artist, or types of projects.¹⁰ Until 2009, to cite an especially dramatic example, the Judith Rothschild Foundation in New York only made “grants to present, preserve, or interpret work of the highest aesthetic merit by lesser-known, recently deceased American [visual] artists.” Many grant programs additionally refuse to consider organizations without a minimum performance history or a minimum budget level, and a majority will not award monies directly to individuals, for-profit entities, or unincorporated groups.

Funders also narrow their scope implicitly through their selection process. The selection is usually made by some combination of the institution’s staff, its board of directors, and outside experts called in for the purpose (often in the form of grant panels).  Because so few individuals are involved in the decision-making process, triage strategies are unavoidable. Application reading may be divided up among the panel or staff, with the result that only one person ever reads any given organization’s entire proposal. When work samples are involved, artists’ fates can be altered forever on the basis of a five-minute (or shorter) reception of their work.

These coping mechanisms are perfectly understandable, given the sheer volume of art produced and imagined. But the unfortunate result is that institutional money is distributed with hardly more fairness than commercial money—and this is especially troublesome because of institutional grantmakers’ power beyond their purses as outsourced curators of other funding streams.  After all, for most individual donors and consumers alike, the art that they even have a chance to encounter is likely to be art that has already passed the muster of multiple professional gatekeepers. The capacity problem that hampers grantmakers’ ability to choose the most promising artists in an equitable way thus compounds itself as it reverberates through the rest of the artistic ecosystem.

The shortage of capacity and its consequences on the diversity, liveliness, and brilliance of the arts world are not going away. With the proliferation of digital distribution networks making it easier than ever to put creative work in the public eye, the defensive mechanisms that funders employ to limit intake are only going to become more and more strained. A solution is needed, fast. Fortunately, there is a cheap, practical, and responsible way for institutions to better cope with their lack of evaluative capacity: they can use crowdsourcing to harness the passion and expertise of a broader range of people dedicated to the arts.

* * *

II. Calling for Backup: Crowdsourcing (to) the Rescue

Typically, institutions select the members of their staffs and grant panels on the basis of passion for and experience with the arts, on the theory that these qualities promote discerning judgments about the merit of applicants. But such traits are by no means limited to this narrow group. Tapping the thousands of dedicated and knowledgeable devotees of specific art forms who engage in robust discussion of the arts every day would allow foundations and agencies to go a long way towards addressing their own capacity problems—and towards opening the distribution of arts philanthropy to a broader range of deserving artists.

Our proposal draws inspiration from the phenomenon of crowdsourcing, which is the practice of outsourcing some function to the public or a significant part of it. Crowdsourcing has its roots in the open-source software movement, which designed and built complex software through the collaboration of anyone with the time, interest, and ability to contribute to a project. The best known example of this practice may be Wikipedia, which draws on the knowledge and editorial acumen of a huge pool of often anonymous volunteers to create a crowdsourced encyclopedia. Rather than relying on a handful of experts, crowdsourcing enlists dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people to do the work—and, in its purest form, to ensure the quality of the end result. The following pages explore some of the ways the commercial and philanthropic sectors have deployed crowdsourcing to direct money to worthy causes, to harness dispersed talent, and to build community.

Directing Donations

Online philanthropy markets that allow individual donors to contribute to charitable causes and micro-entrepreneurs around the world—websites like Kiva, DonorsChoose, Modest Needs, and GlobalGiving—illustrate the practice of crowdsourcing funding decisions across a large number of donors acting independently. Some of these websites aggregate small donations to fund larger projects using a mechanism for voting with dollars. For example, at Modest Needs, donors purchase points that can be allocated to specific, prequalified projects described on the site (such as the cost of a replacement water heater for a single mother). When a project has received enough donor points, the amount requested is sent to the applicant.

Similar online giving models have been employed at a smaller scale in the arts. For example, ArtistShare allows “fans to show appreciation for their favorite [musical] artist by funding their recording projects in exchange for access to the creative process, limited edition recordings, VIP access to recording sessions, and even credit listing on the CD.” Kickstarter allows individual donors to make pledges to creative projects—in the arts, journalism, design, and technology—with defined funding targets and timing. If enough pledges are received by the deadline, the project is funded; otherwise, the funds are returned to the donor.

These online mini-markets facilitate individual support for artists by providing donors more direct access to the artistic process and environment. In cases where the projects funded can be appreciated online, supporting them is not so different from buying a ticket. An alternative model of crowdsourced philanthropy that has gained more recent prominence allows individuals to exert influence on how other people’s philanthropic contributions are spent. Two recent major initiatives by corporate foundations employ this “voting without dollars” concept. JP Morgan Chase’s Chase Community Giving program gave away $5 million in early 2010 to nonprofit organizations based primarily on the votes of Facebook users. Similarly, PepsiCo diverted the $20 million it might have spent on ads during the 2010 Super Bowl to the Pepsi Refresh Project, a new monthly initiative that invites “ideas that will have a positive impact” to compete for grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. Visitors to the site vote to determine the grant winners.

Aggregating Ability

In the examples above, the “crowd” need have no particular expertise to participate fully. (Indeed, one frequent criticism of these models is that a “one person, one vote” or social-network-based approach to philanthropy can all too easily degenerate into a popularity contest with little connection to the merit of the potential recipients.) But crowdsourcing has also proved very effective at harnessing dispersed talent. In the for-profit design world, Threadless, an online T-shirt company, produces designs created and voted on by users of the website. The winning designers receive cash prizes, and the shirts nearly always sell out, generating $17 million in revenue for Threadless in 2006.¹¹

Philanthropic foundations, too, have begun to take advantage of the expertise of passionate people from across the country and the world. Philoptima allows would-be donors to offer “design prizes” to anyone who proposes an innovative solution to a problem chosen by the donor, and “implementation prizes” to any non-profit that submits a promising plan to carry out the solution in its community. (The first design prize on this young site was offered by a new grantmaker seeking to create “a discipline-wide typology of the environmental sector.”) Since 2006, InnoCentive has partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to give global development organizations access to high-quality R&D resources; Rockefeller selects the nonprofits and contributes award money to a network of scientists to solve a specific “challenge” posed by the nonprofit.

Building Community

By engaging and connecting a broad cross-section of individuals, crowdsourcing also has the potential to create a robust community and locus for lively discussion. The Yelp Elite Squad, chosen by Yelp employees from among the popular local search site’s most active contributors, benefit from invitations to exclusive offline events in addition to greater exposure for their reviews. In the nonprofit sector, several websites that make grants emphasize the creation of a forum for the discussion of social issues. Ashoka’s Changemakers initiative is a “community of action” that collaborates on solutions through discussion forums, issue groups, and competitions that reward innovative problem solving. Another site, Netsquared, connects nonprofits, grant-makers, and individual social entrepreneurs both on- and offline to foster social change. The organization sponsors in-person meetings for social innovators and engages its community in a grants program for social action projects. The finalists of its grant-making challenges are shaped by these discussions and chosen by community vote.

Putting it All Together: Guided Crowdsourcing

The very best examples of crowdsourced community—the models that illustrate the potential of the concept at its fullest—augment the tools of crowdsourcing with just enough top-down hierarchy to promote an environment of shared opportunity and responsibility. We call this model guided crowdsourcing. So far, this technique has not been explored in depth by foundations, arts-focused or otherwise, but it has been developed robustly elsewhere.

As mentioned above, Wikipedia is perhaps the oldest and most famous large-scale example of crowdsourcing on the web. While the site is most often identified with the crowdsourced labor used to generate its principal product, some 14 million encyclopedia entries in 272 languages, Wikipedia is also home to a fiercely dedicated user community that has self-organized into a meritocracy. Though the site is open to editing and revision by anyone, a small army of experienced volunteer “administrators” boast additional powers, such as the ability to make edits about living people. These users are chosen by “bureaucrats,” who themselves are selected by community consensus, and disputes among editors are resolved by a volunteer-run Arbitration Committee. These responsibilities not only keep the community’s most passionate members fully engaged; it also puts them to work to improve the community and its project.

Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign used guided crowdsourcing to establish a seamless continuum between motivated volunteers and professional staff. As part of routine campaign operations, professional field organizers would assign new volunteers, who had been recruited online, progressively more difficult tasks to test their fitness for roles carrying greater responsibility. As the campaign progressed, many early volunteers rose to full-time staff positions, providing a clear path of upward mobility for the most dedicated and effective community members. This fusing of top-down leadership with grassroots openness enabled the campaign to achieve its own capacity breakthrough by establishing a viable presence in districts, towns, and whole states that had been considered off-limits by previous Democratic contenders for executive office.

Taking its cue from these successful efforts to shape a broad-based grassroots effort with gentle guidance from the top, a foundation could invent an entirely new model of arts philanthropy—one that matches the explosion of artistic content with an explosion of critical acumen to evaluate it.

* * *

III. Philanthropy’s Finest: The Pro-Am Program Officer Paradigm

We propose that a grantmaking institution supplement its work with guided crowdsourcing by creating an online grants management platform that will also serve as a social network, multimedia showcase, and marketplace for individual donors. By redirecting some portion of its grantmaking budget through this website, the foundation or agency can leverage the critical faculties of passionate and thoughtful arts lovers to address its capacity problem. A sophisticated set of algorithms will empower the website’s community to identify the most qualified and dedicated voices among its own ranks and elevate them to increased levels of influence on a continually renewing basis. In this way, those whose artistic judgments carry the most weight will have earned that status from their peers and colleagues.

How It Works

The process begins when an artist or artist-driven organization (nonprofit or otherwise) applies for a general operating support grant from the sponsoring foundation’s arts program—all forms of art are welcome. Rather than being sent to a program officer for review, the applicant’s materials—proposal narrative, samples of the artist’s work, a list of upcoming events or classes open to the public—will be posted online. This information will be incorporated into each applicant’s public profile on the site.

Members of the public will also be invited to create and maintain profiles. Once registered, they can view materials submitted by grant contenders and share reactions ranging from one-line comments to in-depth critiques. In order to jumpstart the conversation, ensure an initial critical mass of reviewers, and strike a constructive and intelligent tone, the foundation should reach out in advance to knowledgeable arts citizens (perhaps including some of the very gatekeepers mentioned above who might otherwise serve on grant panels) to encourage their participation on the site. The goal is to engage a broad range of art lovers in a robust conversation about the proposals under review—and about the arts more generally—thereby ensuring a better-considered distribution of grant money.

Of course, not all commentators will make equally valuable contributions to the discussion. Just like art, providing critical analysis and consistently thoughtful, informed, and credible feedback requires considerable skill and practice. In short, we want to be able to open up the process to anyone without having to open it to everyone. What qualities would we desire in those who influence resource allocation decisions in the arts? Certainly we would ask that our critics be knowledgeable in the field they review. We would also want them to be fair—not holding ideological grudges against artists or letting personal vendettas influence their judgment. We’d want them to be open-minded, not afraid to dive into unfamiliar or challenging territory when the time comes. And finally, we’d want them to be thoughtful: able and willing to appreciate nuance, and mindful of how what they are experiencing fits into a larger whole.

Technology now allows us to systematically identify and reward these qualities in a reviewer. On the website, a reviewer increases her “reputation score” by winning the respect of the community. Each user can rate individual comments and reviews based on the qualities outlined above; higher ratings increase a reviewer’s standing. To keep the conversation current and make room for new voices, the ratings of older reviews and comments will count for less over time. The reputation algorithm can also reward seeking out unreviewed proposals and commenting on a breadth of submissions. A strict honor code will require users to disclose any personal or professional connections to a project they review, with expulsion the penalty for violators. Reviews suspected of being at odds with this policy can be flagged for investigation by any site user, and the site’s administrators will take action where deemed appropriate.

Every quarter, the professional staff of the foundation will review the reputation scores of community members and choose a crop of users to elevate to Curator status. Selection will be based primarily on peer reviews, but the staff will have final say and responsibility over who is given this privilege. A clear set of guiding principles will be developed and shared to ensure that the choice is as fair and transparent as possible. Curators receive an allowance of “points” to distribute to various projects on the site, usually limited to the discipline or area of the Curator’s expertise. Curators are identified by (real) name to other users so as to foster a sense of accountability, and their profiles show how they have chosen to distribute their points. So long as a Curator maintains a minimum reputation score by contributing new high-quality reviews, he will continue to receive new points each quarter.

As a project accumulates points from Curators, it receives more prominent attention on the site. It might show up earlier in search results, appear in lists of recommendations presented to users who have written reviews of similar projects, or be highlighted on the home page. But since Curators maintain their reputation (and aspiring Curators gain their reputation) in part by reviewing proposals that have failed to attract comments from others, the attention never becomes too concentrated on a lucky few.

When it comes time to award the grants each quarter, the collective judgment of the Curators is used as the groundwork for the decision-making process. This approach ensures that organizations cannot win awards simply by bombarding their mailing lists with requests for votes, because the crowd exerts its influence indirectly through Curators selected on the basis of sustained, high-quality contributions. While it is still ultimately the responsibility of the foundation’s board of directors to choose recipients, we anticipate that adjustments will be made only in exceptional cases—that, essentially, the heavy lifting will have been done by the crowd.

Meanwhile, the very best contributors—the stars of the site—may be engaged by the foundation as paid Editors. Editors are part-time, contract employees who are sent out on assignment to see and review specific public events in their area associated with proposals on the site. Their reviews are highlighted prominently to give their expert work maximum exposure. This system allows the foundation to send trusted reviewers to distant events without having to pay exorbitant travel costs; meanwhile, the writer receives a financial incentive for exceptional ongoing service to the site and the arts community.

Of course, artists, administrators, and contributors won’t be the site’s only audience. Since work samples will represent an important part of many applications, the platform will also be a convenient way for the public to discover new artists and ensembles, guided by the judgments of a myriad of devotees. Each proposal uploaded will give passersby the opportunity to contribute their own money in addition to any comments they may have. As such, the site has the potential to become the first effective online donor marketplace for the arts. The sponsoring foundation could even give donors the option of tacking on a small “tip” to each donation to help defray the site’s (minimal) operating costs.

It is worth emphasizing that, despite the many roles website users will play in the grant process, they will not replace the foundation staff. One or more program officers will need to be in charge of the website and accountable to the board of directors for its successful operation. They will oversee the website to ensure that the ongoing discussion remains frank, thoughtful, and passionate—but not vicious or counterproductive. Such a desirable culture will not develop automatically; fostering it will mean setting and continually revising rules and procedures, reminding users of the funding priorities established by the foundation and engaging in dialogue about those priorities when appropriate, selecting Curators wisely on the basis of peer reviews, expelling users who violate the standards of the community, and developing a method to evaluate and report on the grants made through the site, both to the board and back to the users. Furthermore, we do not anticipate that this model would or should supplant a foundation’s or the field’s traditional grantmaking entirely. “Leadership”-level awards to major service organizations or institutions with a national profile do not face the same kinds of capacity challenges as grants to smaller producing and presenting entities or individual artists, and may require a greater level of expertise in evaluating factors such as financial health and long-term sustainability than a nonprofessional program officer may be able to provide. Thus, we see this approach as one element in a broader portfolio of strategies to optimally support the arts.

Few good ideas come to fruition without resources, and this one is no exception. The platform should be sponsored by a major foundation or institution with a substantial initial investment (we suggest at least $1 million) to signal seriousness of purpose and ensure a meaningful level of support to the artists and organizations involved. Although it would be possible to pilot the system in a limited geographical area or with only certain disciplines at first, the concept can only reach its true potential if a certain critical mass is achieved—enough to make it worth artists’ while to ensure representation on the site and worth reviewers’ while to contribute their time and curiosity to making it thrive.

We anticipate that this system will be highly sustainable. Once the infrastructure is in place, the website will be inexpensive to maintain, and may well prove cheaper than more traditional methods of distributing funds. The powerful incentives provided to both artists (access to a source of funding coupled with real-time feedback on their proposals) and reviewers (the opportunity to gain notoriety, influence, and even material compensation for doing something they love) should be sufficient to maintain interest on all sides.

Finally, the greatest beauty of the site is that there is ample opportunity to experiment with various approaches until just the right formula is found. If the original algorithm for calculating reputation scores turns out to be ineffective, it can be changed. If the rules against reviewing the work of friends turn out to be too draconian, they can be adjusted. If the foundation decides it wants to give Curators actual dollars to distribute instead of abstract points, that is an easy fix. Meanwhile, if the system proves successful, the sponsoring foundation could invite other funders to contribute their resources to the pool, making even deeper impact possible.

Figure I: Program theory for a guided crowdsourcing platform for the arts.

* * *

Summing Up

Our guided crowdsourcing model is designed to integrate many virtues of existing crowdsourcing concepts: giving small-scale projects access to new pools of capital; aggregating the expertise and labor of users; and creating a social space for strangers who share a common interest. When combined and applied to the arts, this triple crowdsourcing carries several special advantages:

• First, it addresses the lack of evaluative capacity in the philanthropic market, enabling a more meritocratic distribution of grants and thus a more vibrant and socioeconomically diverse artistic community.
• Second, because of the structural role of grantmaking institutions, the website indirectly addresses the lack of capacity in the commercial market: the path to commercial success will be made a little less arbitrary through the work of our volunteer curators.
• Third, the robust community we hope to facilitate will double as a feedback mechanism for artists and artist-driven organizations, enhancing the production of art even before grants are awarded.
• Fourth, the site will serve as an incubator for critical talent, identifying and empowering new commentators who can establish a reputation as informed adjudicators, while providing a new outlet for more experienced voices at a time when the job market for critics is rapidly shrinking.
• Fifth, by rewarding contributions that can serve as examples of critical analysis at its best, the site will encourage a more thoughtful and articulate public conversation about the arts. In so doing, it facilitates the establishment of a new breed of Pro-Am curators to match the convergence of amateur and professional in artistic creation and performance.

We expect that, if successful, this model will result in a more equitable distribution of philanthropic funds that always takes into account the actual work product rather than reputation alone; be based on the opinions of acknowledged leaders in the community who continually earn their standing among their peers; and fairly consider the efforts of far more artists and artist-driven organizations than would ever be possible otherwise. If really successful, the model could actually increase the size of the philanthropic market by providing what amounts to the first functioning donor marketplace for artists and arts organizations.

While guided crowdsourcing cannot guarantee all aspiring artists a living, by empowering a new and unprecedentedly large group of thoughtful consumers of the arts to help decide whose dreams deserve to be transformed into reality, it can provide more equality of opportunity than could ever be possible under the current status quo—and guarantee the rest of us richer artistic offerings than ever before.

It’s time to appoint the next generation of arts program officers: us.

* * *

NOTES:

i. Clapp, E. P., ed. 20UNDER40: Re-Inventing the Arts and Arts Education for the 21st Century. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010: 81-97.

1. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 21, 2010. All of the individuals whose views appear in this article are critically acclaimed emerging artists under 40 years of age, and are quoted with permission.

2. Gaquin, D. Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2008: 1; See also National Endowment for the Arts. Artists in a Year of Recession. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009, and; Davis, J. A. & Smith, T. W. General Social Surveys: 1972-2008. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 2009.

3. Williams, K. & Keen, D. 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009: 43.

4. Leadbeater, C. & Miller, P. The Pro-Am Revolution. London: DEMOS, 2004: 21-22.

5. This calculation is based on a conservative estimate of 40 minutes in length per album.

6. Kusher, R. J. & Cohen, R. National Arts Index 2009. Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts, 2009: 62.

7. Ibid: 49.

8. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 20, 2010.

9. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 22, 2010.

10. Foundation Center. “Foundation Directory Online” (n.d.). As of April 2010, only 1.3% of arts funders in the database accept applications with no geographic restrictions.

11. Howe, J. “Join the Crowd.” The Independent (London), (September 2, 2008): 2.

Big News

• The Nonprofit Finance Fund’s founder and CEO, Clara Miller, will be the new head of the F. B. Heron Foundation, one of the pioneers of using a foundation’s endowment investments for mission-related purposes.
• What would the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange be without Liz Lerman? Just the Dance Exchange, apparently.
• Lois Weisberg, longtime head of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, is out amid that agency’s continuing shakeup. Read an interview with her about it here.
• The Washington National Opera and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will merge. (h/t Jonas)

Big Intrigue

• Has the Pepsi Refresh contest been tainted by voters-for-hire from India for the past six to nine months? (Cf. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk being used for spam.)
• Thanks to a Fellowship applicant, I just discovered this year-old, incredibly detailed (and critical) examination of the Richard Florida phenomenon from the perspective of cities who paid for his advice over the past decade. The more I learn, the more I think of RF as a kind of complex and fascinating Rorschach test, someone who reveals more about ourselves by our reactions to him than by anything he says or writes. Hear a recent interview with him by Steve Dahlberg and Mary Alice Long.
• I’m starting to get increasingly freaked out about internet security, and this news that a researcher has developed wifi password hacking software using Amazon Web Services doesn’t help. Says the poster: “Cloud computing makes it easier for hackers to take advantage of weak security networks. There will be some huge and successful attacks this year. The level of preparedness is just not high enough to expect anything else except for some very high profile break-ins.” Uh oh.
• More state arts councils in states run by Republican governors are in trouble. Now it’s Kansas that may be the first to see its arts commission go. Janet Brown, as always, offers wisdom on the role and value of state arts agencies.

Big Projects

• Behold the British versions of Kickstarter and Indiegogo. While we’re on the subject of crowdfunding, Kickstarter’s “best of 2010” list is apparently “super inspiring,” and Brian Newman writes about a really-cool-sounding, Kickstarter-supported restaurant-cum-art-project called What Happens When.
• Awesome map of spoken dialects across North America (via CultureFuture).

Big Data

• The new National Arts Index has been unveiled by Americans for the Arts. You’ll hear a lot about the topline number (97.7, supposedly a 12-year low), but I feel the NAI’s real value is as a compendium for yearly data on 81 separate indicators in one place. I’ll be writing more on this later.
• More Richard Florida: a study on beauty and community satisfaction; the geography of gun deaths. (Curious finding in the latter: McCain vote share was the single variable associated most with gun deaths at the statewide level, more so than poverty, drug use, or possession of guns.)
• Speaking of beauty, here’s Christian Rudder with another stellar stat-porn post on internet dating, this time on female attractiveness and male attention. Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok responds.
• From Helicon Collaborative, a snapshot of arts funding in California. (Also see item at the end of this post.)
• Technology in the Arts surveys tech adoption and implementation among arts organizations.
• In a TEDx talk, Charles Limb describes two neuroscience studies he’s conducted using MRIs of jazz musicians and freestyle rappers improvising.
• Courtesy the Center for Effective Philanthropy, grantees report on their perceptions of foundation evaluation and reporting practices.
• The good news: a majority of Americans oppose cutting government funding for “the arts and sciences” (thanks for the help there, Gallup!). The bad news: Americans are more enthusiastic about cutting arts and science funding than all but one other category the poll asked about.

Big Ideas

• Amid all the hubbub about “emerging” this and that, Michael Kaiser stands up for the old farts. And so does Dan Pallotta (though in his case it’s because he’s about to become one).
• More on the grad school debt racket, this time focusing on law schools. “Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close.” Gabriel Rossman explains the strong incentives professors and institutions have to feed the unrealistic dreams of their graduate students. Meanwhile, Rosetta Thurman explains why you may not need to go to grad school to accomplish what you’re looking to do.
• Kyle MacMillan on how orchestras need to change in the 21st century, via David H. Thomas. Speaking of David H. and new orchestra practices, here he is, a professional orchestral clarinetist mind you, coming out and saying that he’d actually prefer to see an HD broadcast of a great orchestra rather than a live, local orchestral performance in person. Wow.
• And while we’re on the subject of orchestras, check out the news that Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson will lead the Brooklyn Philharmonic. For those of you who are not new music nerds, know that this represents a very radical hire by the struggling Brooklyn Phil. If it pays off, orchestral music may never be quite the same. (And if it doesn’t, I’d be pretty worried about what’s going to happen to orchestras.) No pressure, Alan.
• Nina Simon on Paul Light on innovation. Great read.
• How’s this for attracting new audiences? Playwrights Horizons is offering babysitting services to theater attendees. Worth a shot, I guess.
• Ciara Pressler has a very deep and provocative post at the Fractured Atlas blog on how we are all marketers. I would go even further than her examples: I think that potentially every action one takes professionally (and, arguably, personally) has repercussions for what one might call “reputation management.” The way in which we manifest ourselves to others both publicly and privately is always, ultimately, marketing, whether we choose to think of it as such or not.
• Amelia Northrup rounds up some arts technology trends to watch in 2011.
• At White Courtesy Telephone, Albert Ruesga offers 24 “theses” about foundations. And if Sean Stannard-Stockton tells me I should read this blog, I’m a-gonna read it.
• Are liberals just predisposed to compromise more than conservatives? And does that give conservatives a lasting competitive advantage?

Big Opportunity

• The California Arts Council is looking for a new director.

photo by Angelina

Recently, JP Morgan Chase & Company gave away $5 million to two hundred charities, including some arts organizations, through its Summer 2010 Chase Community Giving campaign. Pepsi has been sending $1.3 million to nonprofit organizations each month this year as part of its Pepsi Refresh campaign, money that would have otherwise gone to Super Bowl ads. American Express is donating $200,000 to each of five organizations every three months. And in all three cases, regular people like you and me are helping to decide the recipients. You’d think we’d be happy about this, right?

Wrong. After largely avoiding controversy in the arts community (though not in the broader nonprofit sphere) when these projects made their first appearance 6-8 months ago, recently philanthropy by popular vote has started to see a strong backlash in these parts. It started with a post from 2am Theatre’s David J. Loehr pointing out the huge marketing gift nonprofits were making to Chase by participating in its program. A week later, Chicago Tribune‘s Chris Jones complained that the spectacle was demeaning to the arts and “yet a further example of the rampant cult of the amateur, masquerading as [a] grass-roots movement.” Then a Twitter controversy (Twitterversy?) erupted last month when no less than Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts got into it with fellow Members Project contestant StoryCorps, prompting the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Luis Cancel to lament in the comments that “marketing and the most venal ethics of pop culture have combined in this misguided effort…to link sponsorship in the arts with [corporations’] need to reach a mass audience.”

From there, the floodgates opened. The Nonprofiteer declared that she doesn’t believe in “crowd-source philanthropy,” calling it a “lazy and manipulative approach to corporate giving.” Technology in the Arts’s Joe Frandoni weighed in, pointing out that “this model has no way of insuring the best organizations reap the rewards or that the most efficient and effective programs receive funding.” And on ArtsBlog, Alison Wade wondered aloud, “the idea of democratizing this process sounds nice, but will the money really be used effectively?” Virtually all the authors complained or mentioned complaints of the deafening volume of solicitations for votes received from nonprofits participating in the sweepstakes.

Earlier this year, I spent quite a bit of time crafting, with co-author Daniel Reid, an article for Edward P. Clapp’s forthcoming 20UNDER40 anthology entitled “Audiences at the Gate: Re-Inventing Arts Philanthropy Through Guided Crowdsourcing.” So you might be surprised to learn that I agree wholeheartedly with the criticisms mentioned above. Indeed, the American Idol model of choosing donation recipients is, in the arts at least, little more than a mild twist on survival of the fittest in the commercial market. Those with the most pre-existing visibility (update: okay, not really) and inherently broad-based appeal will be at a natural advantage to do well, meaning that worthy grassroots, new, and obscure-yet-influential organizations are likely to be shut out. If widely adopted, this approach could actually do more harm than good by undermining one of the core justifications for subsidization of the arts: the notion that there are some forms and instances of human creation that deserve to exist even if the market won’t support them. Democracy is a wonderful thing, but grand leaps of imagination are not often achieved by group consensus.

Yet one would be hard-pressed to argue that our dominant system of institutional giving is all that much better. The decisions of our corporate and foundation funders have an enormous impact in shaping the field, yet in most cases less than a half-dozen people have meaningful input into those decisions. Sometimes, a single individual might drive essentially the entire agenda for a portfolio of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. That’s an incredible amount of influence accruing to an incredibly small number of people. And individuals, no matter how dedicated or qualified, are increasingly not up to the task of responsibly evaluating the full range of artistic activity within their jurisdictions. There simply are not enough hours in the day or days in the year for a human being to give ongoing, fair, and substantive consideration to the work of the millions of artists and tens of thousands of arts nonprofits in the United States today. For all of Chris Jones’s lauding of the “noble tradition of the corporate giving officer,” what percentage of the participants in Chase Community Giving or Pepsi Refresh have had corporate giving officers regularly (or ever!) attend their performances or exhibits?

So in my opinion, we need to be careful about throwing the baby of crowdsourced philanthropy out with the bathwater of popularity contest philanthropy. The latter is not synonymous with the former; it is merely a poorly executed version of it. What we need, instead, is a way of broadening out the selection and adjudication process to a greater number of people without sacrificing the qualities and expertise that make professional program officers special. To do this, we’ll still want to access the crowd, but rather than treat everyone the same, we’ll need to differentiate between good members of the crowd – the ones who are generous with their time, consider differing viewpoints thoughtfully, and demonstrate personal integrity – and bad members of the crowd – “one-issue” voters, poorly informed fly-by commenters, and vendetta-carriers. Put another way, we want to give anybody the opportunity to participate meaningfully without having to give that opportunity to everybody.

The system that Daniel and I designed addresses this challenge by establishing a new class of “star” voter: the Curator. Instead of having our regular users vote directly on arts projects submitted through our (hypothetical) giving platform, we have them vote on the reviews and commentary devoted to those projects instead. Users who build and then maintain a consistently positive reputation among their peers get elevated to Curator status — and it’s the Curators who then exert direct influence on how philanthropic dollars are distributed. We called this tiered approach “guided crowdsourcing,” in that it fuses open, flexible opportunity at the lower levels with structure and influence at the top. This concept is new to arts philanthropy, but it has found success in other fields. Recently, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the sense of community engendered among Yelp’s “Elite Squad” and Amazon’s super-reviewers, who derive considerable intrinsic satisfaction from performing the volunteer labor involved in sharing their experiences with dozens or hundreds of products and local establishments with the broader world. Indeed, as cultural consumers arguably look for deeper engagement with the art that’s important to them, curation represents a way to “do” without dropping everything and becoming a professional artist themselves.

So by all means, rail against the American Idol-ization of giving all you want. Just don’t give up on crowdsourced philanthropy just because we all know Jennifer Hudson should have won in season 3.