Touchdown Clarinetist!
Andrew Taylor is musing about the idea of a “fantasy orchestra league”, modeled after the wildly popular fantasy baseball, football, etc. leagues. It’s a cute notion, but until there’s a way to quantify artistic excellence/performance there’s just no way to make it work. One commenter suggests an American Idol style competitive performance among string quartets, but I suspect I’m not the only one who finds that a vaguely nauseating notion (although I bet my colleague Adam Natale would love it!)
Although there’s no way to award points for an artistic performance in an objective manner, there are some well established metrics for assessing an organization’s performance. I’m thinking of simple for-profit indicators like return on assets as well as more non-profity ones like the ratio of program expenses to fundraising expenses. Taken with a grain of salt and some narrative explanation, these kinds of measurements allow investors and donors alike to compare organizational effectiveness and make informed decisions about allocating limited funds. Of course, that only tells part of the story when you’re looking at a producing or presenting organization (the other part being subjective artistic quality), but it’s extremely valuable when assessing a support organization like Fractured Atlas.
Unfortunately, metrics like these are barely used at all in the non-profit arts world. To the extent that some organizations do cite performance-related statistics, they do so on an ad hoc basis because a particular figure makes them look good. There’s certainly no industry standard in widespread use.
This is a shame for a number of reasons but mostly because it entrenches the status quo and makes it harder for innovative upstarts to break in. It is partly the absence of good, quantifiable data that causes so much of the institutional funding world to operate based on cushy personal relationships, rather than unsentimental scrutiny.
Perhaps a time will come when some standard reporting guidelines arise in our sector that address this need. All I can say is, when that happens, you’ll definitely want to draft Fractured Atlas. Our expense ratio is sweeeeeet!
Tags: measurement
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