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June 15, 2010
Welcome to On Our Minds Twice a month we enjoy sharing what WolfBrown consultants are reading, thinking, and talking about -- what's On Our Minds. It's our way of staying in touch with valued friends and colleagues, and passing along some worthwhile ideas.  Sign up to be a fan on WolfBrown's Facebook page!
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Over the past year, Rebecca and I have been hard
at work on a major study of Bay Area donors.
The results were released last week, and we've created a special page on our website where you can download the
results. There are three reports:
1. A high level summary report, It's Not About You...It's About Them:
A Research Report on What Motivates Bay Area Donors to Give to
the Arts and Artists, which should be of interest to funders,
arts agencies, and others who seek to help artists and small arts groups raise
funds for programs.
2. A series of case studies, Field Reports from the Fund For Artists Matching Commissions
Program: Unlocking the Potential of
Individual Donors,
which describe how some of the individual
artists and arts groups successfully raised funds.
3. A detailed WolfBrown report on what motivates Bay Area donors to give to a
range of arts programs and projects, including results of a survey of over
3,000 donors, for research geeks who want to read the whole bloody thing.
The research was co-commissioned by
The San Francisco Foundation and East Bay Community Foundation, as part of an
effort to better understand the success of their Fund For Artists Matching
Commissions program, through which Bay Area artists raised more than $1.3
million since 2004. I am particularly
grateful to our partners in the research, John Killacky and Diane Sanchez, as
well as Marcy Cady and Holly Sidford of Helicon Collaborative, for all of their
support and good thinking.
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The Next Best Practices
by: Marc Goldring
As a consultant, I'm used to identifying "best
practice" models, as they are useful for clients to learn from the exemplary experience of
others. So I was interested to see Beth Kanter mention "next practices" in her blog. When it comes to technology, she's right at the
front of the line, especially relative to social media, so it's not surprising
that she's latched onto the concept of crowd-sourcing and "next practices," a subtle shift from our common
thinking. A little research finds mention of "next practices" as far back as
2006, in an article by John R. Sullivan, now a professor of
management at San Francisco State University. He focuses on the increasing
speed of innovation and the need to look outside our core business to explore new
models. And Saul Kaplan, the founder of the Business Innovation Factory, argues that "All leaders should spend more discretionary time outside of their
industry, discipline, and sector...The big and important value-creating opportunities will most likely be
found in the gray areas between the silos we inhabit."
So many aspects of arts and culture are changing so rapidly that we
often haven't had time to sort out what the best practices are. We can
learn from what others are trying, even before their approaches have been
anointed as "best." And as various fields and disciplines shift and merge,
looking outside our usual range of comparatives could provide just the flash of
strategic or tactical insight needed to move an organization forward. So while
we still need to cultivate best practices, let's keep a forward-looking eye to
next practices.
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Can U.S. Orchestras Translate Overseas Programs into Local Successes?by: Jane CulbertI
have recently been conducting research in connection with the New Jersey Symphony's efforts to develop a strategic plan for their
arts education programs. In looking to identify effective educational
programming offered by other orchestras, it
is nearly impossible to avoid the influence of El Sistema, Venezuela's highly successful youth
education program that provides free musical training to hundreds of thousands
of Venezuela's poorest students. A number of U.S. orchestras are working to
adapt the El Sistema system in their own cities, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony, and the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio. New England Conservatory has established a fellowship program, (which Tom Wolf wrote about in his article in the April 16th On Our Minds) for those interested in establishing El Sistema
programs outside of Venezuela. And an El Sistema USA network has been set up to support those interested in
the program. A conference was recently held in Los Angeles at which both the successes and the
challenges of translating the program to the United States were discussed. Not
surprisingly, the current need for "proof" of the effectiveness of the program
in order to generate funder support is one of the challenges that U.S.
implementers are facing. In Venezuela, financial support, which happens at the
national level, is based on qualitative evaluation only. Will U.S. programs be
able to model their evaluation efforts on the same foundation of qualitative
research? Is collecting stories enough to convince funders to step up and
contribute? I can only hope so, as these
programs introduce young people to a lifetime passion for music,
and help develop future orchestra audiences.
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NEW - Readers RespondIn response to Rebecca Ratzkin's entry in the last issue of On Our Minds about sustaining arts spaces and LINC's Space for Change program, Victoria Hutter of the National Endowment for the Arts wrote:
"I
read with interest your post in the last Wolf Brown e-newsletter. Our chairman,
Rocco Landesman, has made integrating the arts into community development a
significant piece of his vision for the NEA. Aside from driving his Art Works mantra, this area of endeavor is key to a new
granting program, the Mayors' Institute on City Design 25th
Anniversary Initiative or MICD 25a.
The NEA's 2011 budget includes a request for a program called Our Town, a $5 million granting program intended
to provide grants to plan and develop arts districts, place the art of design
at the center of the development, and promote the arts as core to community
livability."
Thanks Victoria for keeping us up to
date on what's new at the NEA! If you have comments about any of the articles in this week's On Our Mind articles, please email us at info@wolfbrown.com. To contact the author directly, click on the name located underneath the title of the article to be directed to their bio and contact information on our website.
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