ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

• First it was the state arts agencies; now the NEA is under attack. It turns out that the federal budget for the current fiscal year was never actually finalized, but instead was paid for bit by bit. As a result, the Republican House has called for a $22.5 million, or 13%, reduction in the NEA’s budget for the current fiscal year. As in, the one that is going on right now, for which grants are already being made. This would be the largest reduction to NEA funding in 16 years. (Not surprisingly, Republicans have since offered amendments to cut things even further…including one amendment from Scott Garrett (R-NJ) to eliminate the agency.) On top of this, President Obama’s budget for FY2012 (which begins October 1 of this year) calls for nearly as deep a cut – despite the fact that other cultural agencies (including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian) did not receive proportionate reductions. This NEA is brimming over with smart, capable leadership and has been moving in some really exciting directions lately; it would be a shame to see that momentum blunted by capricious political winds outside of its control. You can take action here; please do this, especially if you do not live in New York City, Boston, DC, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco. Your voice matters.
• If you don’t like the economic impact-focused arguments at the link above, feel free to use Arlene Goldbard’s alternative letter instead. Arlene makes the moral case for arts support like no other.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Barry Hessenius offers an important perspective on the pragmatic side of arts advocacy. No vote occurs in a vacuum or truly on its merits in politics; everything is a horse trade. It’s ugly, but it’s what those people in the Middle East are taking to the streets for.
• Other perspectives on this: Adam Huttler fires a shot across the bow of our single-issue, NEA-funding-focused advocacy model and argues for more strategic alliances with and awareness of non-arts-specific goals. Arlene Goldbard and Guy Yedwab suggest that if we want to make a good long-term case for public arts support, the term “arts” might not be the most helpful and we might want to make sure  the work we do actually serves the public. And Matthew Guerrieri has this awesome find of a clean energy industry economic impact study that promises substantially fewer jobs created per dollar spent than in the arts.
• Finally, the greatest threat to our public arts infrastructure may not be rabid conservatives, but apathetic progressives. I’ve been frustrated for a long time by the lack of reciprocity between the arts community’s support for the liberal establishment and the liberal establishment’s support for the arts. This week, we have Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, and Kevin Drum coming out as anywhere from mildly to strongly opposed to direct federal funding for the arts, and Tyler Cowen (though not exactly a liberal himself) denying that there’s a liberal case to be made. These are important voices, folks…a lot more important than Bob Lynch. They are thought leaders in the progressive community who don’t get the rationale for why the arts should have a role in federal policy. We need to educate them.

You Say You Want a Revolution

• Is this a game-changer? Kickstarter is letting organizations “curate” pages of crowdfunding campaigns. For-profits, nonprofits, and government are all represented among the current curators.
• I haven’t written too much about the crisis facing the Detroit Symphony; here is the latest news, some analysis from New England Conservatory’s Tony Woodcock, and more from Greg Sandow.
• Diane Ragdsale says in order to solve the supply/demand problem, we need to be able to identify mission-failing institutions and help them die. Sound familiar? By the way, here’s Diane’s manifesto on arts philanthropy and sustainability.
• Meanwhile, Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre goes for a more flexible business model. And a California legislator introduced a bill to create a flexible purpose corporation to compete with B-Lab’s Benefit Corporation and the L3C. Finally, Andrew Taylor writes on the intriguing economic set-up of Carnegie Hall’s upcoming Spring for Music orchestra festival.
• Shocker alert: Rosetta Thurman no longer identifies as a nonprofit professional. Don’t worry Rosetta, as long as you don’t adopt Dan Pallotta’s positions on compensation, you’ll still be okay in my book.
• Turns out the connection between the arts and regional economic growth goes back a long way:
  

  [C]ities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses.

Someone’s Gonna Pay

• The Chronicle of Philanthropy names the top 50 donors of 2010; the LA Times susses out the biggest givers in the arts.
• Mike Bloomberg will once again generously support the arts in New York City.
• Assets for Artists is expanding to new locations. And so is the Awesome Foundation.
• More on supply and demand: Laura Zabel and Rebecca Novick editions.

Figuring Out the Details

• GiveWell is back with a typically thorough self-evaluation. Here’s an overview (bottom line: fewer causes, more “gold medal” charities), top-level priorities, GiveWell as a project, GiveWell as a donor resource, and web traffic stats.
• Andrew Taylor on prize philanthropy and unintended consequences.
• New study from the European Union on the entrepreneurial dimension of cultural and creative industries. And here’s one from Economist Intelligence Unit on the synergy between livability and economic development in urban places – culture is explicitly acknowledged as a component of livability.

Revolutions Can Be Fun Too

• Cool article about the Knight Foundation’s program supporting Random Acts of Culture.
• OKTrends considers the questions to ask on a first date. Want to know whether that hot chick will sleep with you? Ask her if she likes the taste of beer. How about that hot dude? Ask him if he’s ever imagined killing somebody. (I’m not making this up.)
• Congratulations to my friend and colleague Ron Ragin, whose performance on “Baba Yetu,” better known as the theme to the best-selling video game Civilization IV, helped the composer win two Grammys over the weekend. Here’s Ron bustin’ out the pipes for a PBS special on Video Games Live.

I’ve made it my mission to get the arts a fair representation at this conference, which is entitled “Advancing Sustainable Global Enterprise: Problem Solvers, Innovators, and Changemakers,” and inspired by last year’s crowdsourced WNYC show segment on arts policy, I thought I’d open up the process to all of you. I am pitching the two topics of 1) Art and Community Revitalization and 2) The Creative Economy as particularly relevant to Net Impact’s mission and audience. Here’s an excerpt from the email I sent a Net Impact board member making the case:

Rationale for Integrating the Arts into Net Impact
Net Impact seeks to make a positive impact on society by developing leaders who use the tools of business to improve people’s lives. Much of Net Impact’s current focus revolves around the role of the environment and clean energy in a sustainable future for business and society. It’s worth nothing that a century ago, the public conversation around the environment revolved around parks and conservation—issues seen as important, yet largely separate from everyday life. Even when concerns about pollution brought the interaction between business and environment to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s, calls to stop acid rain and save the whales were still treated for the most part as distinct causes, isolated from their broader connections to other areas of human endeavor. It has taken until today for a healthy and productive conversation to develop around the nexus between environment, energy, and the economy, which now provides such rich material for the conversations at Net Impact events such as last year’s conference.

I believe that a similar conversation is beginning to develop around the role of a different natural resource in the world economy: human creativity. Urbanist Richard Florida argues in his bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class that a new model of economic development is in its nascent stages around the world, one in which the jobs gravitate to where the talent is, rather than talent gravitating to where the jobs are. Florida posits that the so-called “Creative Class,” which includes white-collar management professionals such as strategy consultants and financial advisors in addition to a “super-creative core” of artists, scientists, and teachers, chooses where to live (and thus, where to spend much of its money) based on a wide range of factors beyond simply the availability of jobs in their industry, such as the level of diversity, openness, and tolerance for new ideas in a community. Those metropolitan areas with high concentrations of creative class workers, continues Florida, then benefit from a competitive economic advantage over other regions.

So where do the arts fit into this paradigm? Cultural policy advocates and researchers argue, and in some cases have conclusively shown, that the arts carry with them a number of “instrumental” benefits for communities, which can be described as positive spillover effects that are associated with engagement in the arts or the presence of arts producers in a defined geographic area. These spillover effects can include decreased poverty rates and increased population in otherwise depressed areas; substantial economic impacts resulting from spending on behalf of nonprofit arts organizations and their audiences (Americans for the Arts estimates the total impact at $166.2 billion across the country, and for a number of reasons this number may represent an undercount); and rising property values that accrue to all landowners in the community. I suggest that two of these instrumental benefits are especially worthy of deeper exploration in a future Net Impact National Conference.

Art and Community Revitalization
A growing body of research literature now suggests that the physical presence of nonprofit arts institutions in a community or neighborhood produces collateral benefits to those communities in the form of higher levels of civic engagement, increased land values, and lower poverty rates; and that these benefits accrue to community members whether or not they participate directly in arts organizations’ activities. It makes sense: people like to live in and visit interesting places, and the arts make places more interesting; therefore, the arts help neighborhoods attract mobile individuals and strengthen ties to existing residents. This panel would explore whether the arts should play an integral role in community development strategies alongside more traditional methods such as workforce training and transportation infrastructure, and investigate the success of practices currently in use.

The Creative Economy
As more and more traditional avenues of work become replaced by new technologies and new paradigms, it is becoming increasingly clear that the only truly sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to absorb and generate new ideas quickly. This panel will examine the multifaceted role of creativity in our economy, both as the engine of entire sectors in and of itself, and as an essential tool in moving the pace and productivity of business as a whole forward. To what extent do the arts and creative industries have the potential to serve an R&D function for the rest of society? What do the arts have to learn from business, and what can business learn from the arts?

Just as Net Impact has much to gain by including the arts, the arts community would also benefit greatly from fuller participation in Net Impact. By their very nature, artists and arts organizations pursue a hybrid business model that often combines a significant earned income revenue stream with less tangible goals. Unlike standard for-profit enterprises, fundamental aspects of arts organizations’ products are not negotiable. For this reason, their audience development initiatives share much in common with the so-called “social marketing” necessary for many social ventures. Yet despite these and other commonalities, there currently exist few opportunities for those in the arts community to communicate with peers across the social sector. Incorporating the arts more fully into Net Impact events would do much to fill this unfortunate void.

As part of the proposal, I’m required to identify four speakers and three alternates for each panel, and provide their bios and a rationale for inviting them. So I put it to you: who would you want to see speak on these topics? I’m especially looking for people who not only know what they’re talking about, but are articulate and charismatic in front of an audience (a lesson learned from both organizing and attending previous conferences). Respond here in comments or feel free to email me directly at ian.moss@yale.edu with suggestions. Feel free to nominate moderators as well as panelists. I look forward to your ideas!