The 2008 Technology in the Arts Conference will be taking place in Pittsburgh, PA, from October 9th-11th.  Both Fractured Atlas’ Executive Director, Adam Huttler, and Director of Member Services, Adam J. Natale, will be conducting seminars during the conference.  And, since Fractured Atlas members can receive a 25% registration discount, we encourage you to attend (we would encourage you to attend anyway, since it’s one of the best conferences out there!).

The Technology in the Arts Conference is a resource for the arts community, sparking dialogue around the role of technology in our planning and programming, discussing best practices as well as lessons learned, and providing hands-on, practical skills where possible.  The annual conference brings together the full spectrum of organizations within the arts, from the local to national levels, to examine the commonalities that exist in useful technologies as well as the opportunities for partnership.

Online registration for the 2008 Technology in the Arts Conference is now open.  If you are a Fractured Atlas member and wish to take advantage of the discount, simply go to our Special Offers & Discounts section and scroll to “Technology in the Arts.”  This discount applies to the Hands-On Training Workshops as well as to general conference registration.  If you apply by September 5, 2008 (the early bird deadline), you can save even more money!

Further information on the conference - registration deadlines, hotel accommodations, schedule, etc. - may be found at http://www.technologyinthearts.org/conference.

The conference is also still accepting nominations for the 2008 ArtsTech Awards for Artists, Arts Organizations, and Funding Organizations through August 8, 2008 (so please nominate us!).  Further information on criteria and the nomination process may be found at http://www.technologyinthearts.org/?page_id=492.

We hope to see you in Pittsburgh!

If you’re feeling wonky or if you’re just looking for respected sources to cite in your next grant application, you should check out PolicyArchive.org, a new website from the Center for Governmental Studies.

PolicyArchive is an innovative, new digital archive of global, non-partisan public policy research. It makes use of the power, efficiency, and economy of modern Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research. It offers a subject index, an internal search engine, useful abstracts, email notifications of newly added research, and will soon expand to offer information on researchers and funders, and even user-generated publication reviews. Over time, it will grow to include policy content from international and corporate organizations.

A quick perusal found a fairly small number of listings on cultural policy.  The site’s brand new, however, so hopefully it will grow over time.

I spent the first half of this week at the Fortune Tech Conference. Usually when I go to events like this they’re totally arts-centric, so it was (mostly) refreshing to be surrounded by folks with a completely different perspective. (Note to Andrew Taylor: thanks to everyone’s obsession with VC-funding and industry gossip, this conference was optimized around informal networking.  It’s not as hard as it sounds, and largely comes down to less programming in a smaller space.)

Yesterday morning I attended a breakfast session called “Is Philanthropy Dead?”  The panelists were Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org, Premal Shah of Kiva.org, and Dan Shine of AMD’s 50×15 Initiative. Despite the deliberately provocative title, the session spent relatively little time bashing the traditional philanthropic model. Instead, most of the conversation focused on the issue of transparency in fundraising.

Best and Shah both credit the transparency of their processes as a primary factor behind their success. The most compelling story came from Best, whose organization gives individual donors the opportunity to fund classroom projects in public schools.  DonorsChoose.org guarantees that donors will receive a packet of photographs and thank you letters from the grateful recipients (and facilitates that process behind the scenes).  Apparently this works as planned 98% of the time.  In the other 2% of cases, however, the teacher reneges on his responsibility to coordinate the thank you packet.  When this happens, DonorsChoose.org preemptively contacts the donor to inform her of the error and offers to “refund” the donation by crediting it towards another project.  Well, it turns out that these “we screwed up” phone calls are the most effective fundraising appeals they ever make, with a large number of donors declining the refund and offering to fund another project.

This experience is consistent with research into consumer behavior which suggests that the most loyal customers are those for whom something went wrong but the company quickly and effectively resolved the problem.  Unfortunately, most of us in the non-profit sector are terrified about admitting failure.  It’s as if the fact that people give us money to carry out our work creates such a solemn responsibility that 100% success is the only option.  This absurd mindset has several negative consequences.  First, fear of failure makes us risk-averse to a sometimes crippling degree.  Second, when failures occur despite our cautious hedging, we’re totally unwilling to speak candidly about the experience.  This prevents us from learning from our peers and advancing understanding in the overall sector.

Transparency is about more than owning up to failures, of course.  It means disclosing information about your organization’s processes, financial performance, and business model.  And, of course, it also means sharing information about your successes in a way that lets donors feel like respected collaborators.

This last category is where Kiva.org really excels.  Kiva.org gives individuals the ability to provide 0% interest microfinance loans to small business entrepreneurs in the developing world.  Lenders receive regular progress reports and - most of the time - get their money back upon the project’s completion.  Shah described the effect of this transparency as being almost addictive.  Many lenders check their loan portfolios daily, obsessively tracking the impact of their support.

It seems to me that arts organizations are particularly lousy at these kinds of transparency.  Part of it stems from a misguided desire to maintain the mystique of the creative process.  For the most part, though, I suspect we just don’t give it any thought.

So here’s my challenge to the field: what would this kind of tranparency look like for an arts organization and how can we build it into our routine operations?

I don’t have the stats to prove it, but I’d guess that a surprisingly high percentage (maybe even a majority) of the films produced in the US in a given year are independent documentaries.  Certainly that’s true of the 1100+ independent filmmakers in the Fractured Atlas membership, many of whom participate in our fiscal sponsorship program.

Of course, very few of these films ever get seen by more than a handful of people.  Movies are mass media in America, and if you’re not going to gross $50 million in your opening weekend, it’s tough to find a serious distributor.

Thankfully, the internet is systematically dismantling the very notion of mass media. Today, via Walter Mossberg, I learned about a new service called SnagFilms, which aims to faciliatate the viral distribution of independent documentary films.  As Mossberg puts it:

The service … allows anyone with a blog, a Web site, or even a page on a social-networking site, to open a virtual movie theater and show these documentaries, free.  The virtual theater is a small widget that contains the film, and that can be embedded easily and quickly in a wide variety of popular social-networking services and blog platforms.  No technical knowledge is needed.

SnagFilms already has an impressive roster of films to choose from, and a wide open content model promises an even greater bounty in the future.  Filmmakers can submit their work simply by emailing submissions@snagfilms.com.

So let’s try this out, shall we?  A quick perusal of the site turned up a few interesting-looking films.  (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually watched any of these, so view at your own risk.  They may be offensive or simply not very good.)

First up is Heavy Metal in Baghdad:

Next we have Freestyle, the Art of Rhyme:

And finally, Black, White, and Gray: a Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe:

So, I am a bit of a personal finance freak. I came across a post today on one of my favorite p.f. blogs that immediately related to my work here. The post offers GREAT advice for artists who are trying to build an audience, especially if you have little experience in networking. I encourage those of you facing the issue of butts in seats to check it out. I found it useful - anyone else?

Many of our members (mostly those in NY State) received a healthcare-related mailing from us in the past few days.  Unfortunately, a typographical error on the part of the design firm we used resulted in the wrong phone number being printed in the tri-fold brochure.  If you tried to call us and found yourself speaking to a random law firm - sorry!

For the record, our correct phone number is (212) 277-8020.

If you haven’t checked out my last post about the National Performing Arts Convention, you can view it here.

Quick intro:  Throughout the week, convention attendees convened in small groups (”caucuses”) to discuss topics/issues effecting the field at large.  At the conclusion of the convention, everyone who remained met in a large group to decide how to approach these issues going forward.  Although making the final decisions via group-thought was difficult and annoying as a result of technological glitches and, in my opinion, of an underinformed group, the convening still produced some interesting feedback from the performing arts field.

Here is Issue #3….

Issue #3: The increasing diversity of our communities creates an opportunity to engage a variety of ages, races, identities, and cultures in our audiences and organizations.  Which three strategies are most important to take in order to advance our vision?

Because diversity can be a touchy subject, before I go on, I should say that these are NOT Fractured Atlas’ thoughts and opinions, but rather my own.

First off, let me be sure to clarify what I think of when I hear the word diversity.  I think of different races — white, black, Hispanic/Latino, etc.  I think of different cultures — American, French, Nigerian, Brazilian, etc.  I think of different ages — toddlers, tweens, teens, young adult, middle-aged, over-the-hill, and elderly.  I think of different sexual orientations — straight, gay, transexual, etc.  I think of different classes — lower, middle, upper-middle, upper.  There are more categories I won’t even begin to list.  Diversity means involving ALL of the different groups, including those in the minority AND majority.

Let’s be frank, though.  “Diversity” is a word that gets tossed around way too much as a hot term — something we all have to include in our organizations, in our lives, and in our grant applications.  And I think a lot of us are missing the point.  Diversity cannot be forced into where it doesn’t make sense.  For instance, let’s say there was a theatre company that set out to do August Wilson’s ten-play cycle.  One would expect their casts to be made up of African American actors.  Should they be forced to diversify their casts by including Asian Americans and Latinos?  No.  Should straight men be allowed to join the New York Gay Men’s Chorus?  Probably not (wasn’t there a Will & Grace episode about that??).  These things just don’t make sense.

Whenever possible, diversity should happen naturally.  And, we should also be looking at how we’re already diverse within our own groups.  Here at Fractured Atlas, for instance, we’re all pretty young (I won’t divulge how young).  That’s not very diverse, correct?  But, our artistic backgrounds are extremely diverse.  We have theatre artists, a dancer, visual artists, and an art historian.  Out of eight people, I think that’s pretty diverse.  As a culture, we need to start embracing the diversity we already have in our groups and organizations before we try to force diversity for diversity’s sake.  If you’re open to working with new people — whoever they may be — then, in my mind, you’re open to being diverse.  At that point, diversity should happen organically.

So, that clarifies my stance.

Here is what the audience voted for among the suggestions:

On a NATIONAL level… “Charge national service organizations to create dialogue at convenings, create training programs, promote diverse art and artists, and partner with grassroots organizations who are already connected to diverse communities.”

My thought on this… Come on, folks!  This is already happening and has not done much except result in arguments (in my honest opinion).  Let’s try something new and innovative for a change.  The strategy I was hoping to see pushed forward was: “Create a media campaign with artists from diverse communities including celebrities to provide exposure to diverse art.”  I know I dissed the media campaigns in some of my prior posts, but here is where I think it would be most effective.  I think this would appeal to diverse youth who look to celebrities as their heroes.  Cultivate these thoughts within the minds of our youth and you start paving a road for the future.

On the LOCAL level, the audience voted for: “Open an honest dialogue across community groups and sectors to share priorities and identify barriers to participation.”

Here we go again with the touchy-feely stuff.  I’ve witnessed open dialogues.  Some go well, but as soon as you say “diversity,” everyone has their own opinion and is not willing to budge.  Instead, why don’t we try to “Partner within the arts, as well as with community organizations, to build relationships.”  And I’m not talking about phony, “let’s apply for a consortium grant” relationships.  I’m talking about honest-to-goodness partnerships, where it makes complete sense to partner with the community organizations.  Not to toot our own horn, but Fractured Atlas has been doing a lot of advocacy work in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn area recently and, in order to connect with the artists in that community, we needed to connect with their community organizations (many of which are culturally-specific institutions).  Why did we do this?  Because it makes sense in the context of the project.  In the process, we are diversifying our programming and our reach.

On an INDIVIDUAL/ORGANIZATIONAL level, the audience favored: “Discover arts in your community offered by cultures other than your own and establish peer relationships.”

Hooray!  One I finally agree with.  Granted, again, I don’t believe diversity only means cultural diversity (as is noted by the suggestion above).  But, I think this gets the point across.  If you want to be diverse and want it to happen in a natural way, you have to actually be interested in the other cultures/orientations/groups.  If you’re unfamiliar with those groups, then you need to get out there and introduce yourself.  If you’re uncomfortable doing this, find someone who can serve as a connector between yourself and this group.  It’s like working across artistic disciplines.  If you are a filmmaker who wants to start working with dancers, you have to go see dancers perform!  If your interest has been peaked, follow your gut and learn more.  Discover and actively participate.  It’s really not that difficult.  If you just open your circle up to more people, you will automatically be diversifying that circle.

As I said before, many people have their own opinions about diversity.  And you’re welcome to disagree with mine.  Please feel free to post comments!

I hope you have enjoyed my series on NPAC.  I’ll be sure to get back to the member profiles next week!

Via Donor Power Blog, a helpful list of F.A.Q.s for non-profits (artists count) thinking about whether and how they should be blogging.  Much of the advice boils down to: don’t do unless it serves your mission and you’re prepared to do it in a manner that is authentic, sincere, and committed.  Worth a read.

P.S. About a month ago I announced that Fractured Atlas member profiles now feature blog syndication.  Since then, about 20 members have set up their feeds to re-publish on the Fractured Atlas site.  Here’s a list of the early adopters:

ashley
backpod
CoG
CollisionWorks
doanart
dopeswan-nyc
Dreamcatcher1
ecarlislenorton
elixir_theatre
fistinthepocket
Gregwproject
innercity
konradical
My Life as a Bald Soprano
niamapers
peoplesmonastery
phase3
playlabnyc
ShattertheGlass

Not sure how I missed this one, but last month the US Senate introduced a bill that nearly doubles the standard income tax deduction threshold for performing artists. The bill also:

• Allows the $30,000 limit (which is currently $16,000) to be applied on a per-individual rather than per-return basis, which is a boon to households with multiple professional performers;
• Indexes the limit to inflation.

Senator Charles Schumer, who sponsored the legislation, observed:

This tax code is so outdated, it’s more appropriate for court jesters from the Middle Ages than for today’s performing artists.

Indeed.

Ray D. Madoff, writing in this morning’s NY Times, laments the news that Leona Helmsley bequeathed most of her $8 billion fortune to a foundation dedicated to the care and welfare of dogs:

The charitable deduction constitutes a subsidy from the federal government. The government, in effect, makes itself a partner in every charitable bequest. In Mrs. Helmsley’s case, given that her fortune warranted an estate tax rate of 45 percent, her $8 billion donation for dogs is really a gift of $4.4 billion from her and $3.6 billion from you and me.

To put it in perspective, our contribution to Mrs. Helmsley’s cause equals approximately half of what we spend on Head Start, a program that benefits 900,000 children.

What will we get for our $3.6 billion? An eternal monument to Leona Helmsley’s generosity toward dogs.

First off, why all the canine hate?  Okay, so it’s true that few of us share Leona’s priorities, or at least her apparent enthusiasm.  But I don’t share all of the federal Government’s priorities either.  At the risk of getting political - would you rather than $3.6 billion be spent for the care and welfare of dogs or to buy bombs that will be blown up somewhere in the middle east?

This is the beauty of the charitable deduction.  It decentralizes decisions about which public services are most deserving of support.  Sometimes people make bad decisions.  Sometimes they accomplish brilliant, ambitious things that would never come out of government (witness the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).  If you believe in the power of markets and the wisdom of crowds, then you believe that, in the aggregate, this is an efficient way of ensuring that society’s concerns are addressed.

Of course, there are limitations.  These are defined by Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.  As explained on the IRS website:

The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.  The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

(Notice that preventing cruelty to animals is expressly mentioned, so Leona’s gift seems unambiguously within established guidelines for charitability.  Also notice that there’s nary a mention of the arts…  That’s right, we fall under “education”, a seemingly precarious position that makes me nervous whenever I contemplate it!)

So Madoff’s pretty misguided on this point. However he raises another issue that deserves to be taken very seriously:

Most such foundations perform no charitable work but only give money to organizations that do. The law requires foundations to spend a minimum of just 5 percent of their assets a year, thus helping ensure their perpetual existence, and their donors’ immortality. In meeting this requirement, foundations are allowed to count fees paid to their trustees and other administrative expenses.

In 2003, legislation was introduced in Congress that would have required private foundations to devote the full 5 percent to charitable expenditures. But the foundations complained that this would threaten their perpetual existence, and the bill did not pass.

Some people who establish perpetual charitable trusts may assume that their philanthropic dollars will go further if the trust distributes only its investment income and preserves its principal. Anyone familiar with the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs knows the importance of not spending principal. However, because a dollar spent today is worth more than a dollar spent several years from now, in many cases, the sum of payments made over time — even in perpetuity — never equals the value of the original principal.

Anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of finance knows that he’s right.  The financial math leads inescapably to the conclusion that private foundations would be maximally effective if they gave away all of their assets within their first year of giving.  Of course, this reasoning fails to consider that wiser giving decisions will presumably be made if there’s a little more time to make them.

So where is the middle ground?  Reintroducing (and passing) that 2003 legislation would be a good start.  By requiring that operating expenses be above and beyond the 5% minimum annual payouts, you ensure that the more efficient (or less profligate) a foundation is, the better shot it has at immortality.  Another approach would be to benchmark the minimum payout threshold to investment returns, thereby ensuring that the foundation’s endowment doesn’t outpace its giving.