
Non-Profit Quarterly recently published a piece charting out the cyclic nature of boards of directors. If ever you have been frustrated with your board and wondered why it is acting the way …
SOURCE: artshacker.com at 03:00AM[SHARE]A little irreverence today after talking about philosophical questions like “what is art for?” In the past few years, I have done a lot of writing about the need to help people r…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:12AM[SHARE]This week Diane Ragsdale wrote a piece addressing the difficultly people have with the idea of Art for Arts Sake. She says when she conducts workshops and asks arts administration types …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:48PM[SHARE]I wanted to call attention to the recent return of the Hokule'a, a double hulled voyaging canoe, to Hawaii after a three year voyage around the world that saw the canoe travel 42,000 miles t…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:42PM[SHARE]The indemnification clause is a part of a contract that is often difficult to understand. Even after reading this post, you will still want to consult a lawyer, but you will be more awar…
SOURCE: artshacker.com at 06:45PM[SHARE]Last month Non Profit Quarterly suggested that organizations undergoing executive leadership transition consider the shared leadership model that many performing arts organizations employ.Â…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 01:18AM[SHARE]You wouldn’t think fishermen needed help telling a story, but according to Non-Profit Quarterly, the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance is looking for just that. They are getting…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:32AM[SHARE]I visited Fallingwater this weekend. Believe it or not, my impetus for being there wasn’t due to the 150th anniversary Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, but rather because for the l…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:05PM[SHARE]Given all the controversy about the depiction of presidents as stand-ins for Julius Caesar, I thought I would offer a somewhat more light-hearted example of how what we think we know about a…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 01:24AM[SHARE]Over the years I have written about studies which have found that the younger generation starting careers in non-profit organizations weren’t content to put in long hours and pay their…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:42PM[SHARE]Last week, Non-Profit Quarterly noted that the number of Giving Circles in the US were growing and wondered if this had implications for institutional giving. If you haven’t heard of t…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:06PM[SHARE]Pacific Standard had an interesting piece about the misconceptions music teachers and students studying to be music teachers have about the neurological benefits of music and music education…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:12PM[SHARE]I recently became aware of the Young Professionals’ Choral Collective out of Cincinnati and was impressed at how they structured themselves to facilitate involvement by a younger demog…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:33PM[SHARE]If you have a large physical plant or campus of buildings and aging HVAC, lighting or water systems, you may want to consider an Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC). Under this arrang…
SOURCE: artshacker.com at 03:00AM[SHARE]Carter Gillies emailed me a question this morning relating arts with sports which set off a whole cascade of thoughts. First of all, we often talk about how arts organizations and creators n…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 08:48PM[SHARE]Almost as soon as I published my post yesterday about building community around augmented reality, I started thinking about how that might work with live performance. One of my first thought…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:06PM[SHARE]Two months ago I confessed I may have misread the impact and potential of the Pokemon Go game on attracting new customers and audiences. However, the Knight Foundation feels that the basic t…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:54PM[SHARE]The challenge of being creative in a non-profit environment is that you have big ideas, but few resources. So if you have a great idea for a new project or even an extension of an existing p…
SOURCE: artshacker.com at 03:00AM[SHARE]Something I don’t really often see people write about are the benefits of sitting on a grant panel, especially for an organization that funds you. First of all, the organization will l…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:36PM[SHARE]In the comment section of yesterday’s post, Carter Gillies warned about succumbing to the temptations of survivorship bias and only holding up a few successful cases as examples to emu…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:18PM[SHARE]A year ago on Quartz a list appeared by former Stanford dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, outlining what every 18 year old should know. I briefly toyed with the idea of doing a post about how the …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:48PM[SHARE]The Washington Post had a story about an internet company in Korea which started a policy three years ago where all employees would be addressed by an English name rather than their Korean n…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:18PM[SHARE]The idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master something has largely been debunked since Malcolm Gladwell first suggested it. Still, I think he did everyone a favor by suggesting this number …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 04:33AM[SHARE]Great ideas can be found and cultivated everywhere. That is the basic message of a blog post on the Center for Small Towns’ website. They note that reporting on rural towns often s…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 03:36AM[SHARE]I have a fairly regular standing appointment on a radio station to talk about upcoming events at our performing arts center. Often the host will ask me to talk about the process we go throug…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:33AM[SHARE]Via Marginal Revolution blog, comes a story about a tourist spot in China that supposedly put in speed bumps to force people to slow down and appreciate the scenery. It made me think, is thi…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:06AM[SHARE]If you haven’t been following Nina Simon on her Museum 2.0 blog or haven’t read her book, The Art of Relevance, her recent TEDx Palo Alto talk could be a good 12 minute intro to …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 04:54AM[SHARE]Via Artsjournal.com is a thought-provoking essay about artistic performance on Aeon. Dancer Barbara Gail Montero posits that a true expert performer doesn’t surrender to “the flo…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 04:31AM[SHARE]You may have heard about the lawsuit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art whose signs recommending $25 admission fee was seen as obfuscating the fact you can pay what you want. The mus…
SOURCE: artshacker.com at 03:00AM[SHARE]I have mentioned a couple times how Jamie Bennett addressed a belief in a TEDx talk that art is what other people do in other places. I wonder if there might be a little “familiari…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 03:54AM[SHARE]I have written about stakeholder revolts where people in the community force non-profit boards to reconstitute themselves, usually in reaction to a planned closing of the organization. …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:02PM[SHARE]

