GreatNonprofits and the Arts

Hello! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the new Research Director at Fractured Atlas. I’ve been working for several weeks primarily on the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map, but I’m also here to follow trends in arts policy and research and help bring them to a wider audience. You may have seen a couple of my recent contributions here: a wrap-up of an “arts visioning retreat” I attended in Sacramento last month as well as a couple of related conversations and research reports; and a report on the NEA Cultural Workforce Forum.

I promise my entry for today will be less wonky than those two. I’ve spent a good amount of time over the past few years getting to know the general (as in, non-arts-specific) nonprofit and philanthropic landscape, and one thing that’s become very clear is that there is a hunger out there for giving marketplaces - that is, websites or other platforms where you can get information about worthy nonprofits and compare them to each other so that donors can decide how to “spend” their donations. This concept (sometimes broadened to encompass the concept of a “social capital marketplace”) has been gaining a ton of traction in the philanthropy world in particular, and so it’s not surprising that GreatNonprofits has drawn its fair share of attention from that set. Often described as akin to “Yelp for charities,” GreatNonprofits allows users to rate and write reviews of nonprofits with which they’ve had personal interaction, much the way that people write reviews of the restaurant where they had brunch last weekend. The site’s founders are particularly interested in making sure that the people served by nonprofits - not just the small elite group who make funding decisions and study nonprofits for a living - get their voices heard.

Another tendency I’ve noticed in broader discussions about nonprofits and philanthropy, whether they’re happening online, at conferences, or in the classroom, is that the arts all too often get lost in the shadows. There are a lot of  reasons for this, such as the frequent use of “charity” as a synonym for “nonprofit” and the arts’ heavy focus on intellectual property as compared with other causes, but the upshot is that the arts might as well be invisible to a lot of people who care passionately about making the world a better place and have the money to do something about it. And that’s too bad, since I think most of us would agree that the arts could use some face time with people like that.

That’s why I’m really excited that GreatNonprofits has partnered with Guidestar and Intersection for the Arts to launch the 2010 Arts Appreciation Campaign. It seems the good folks at GreatNonprofits recognized that there weren’t enough arts organizations represented on the site through reviews, and is now specifically reaching out to the arts community to rectify the situation. Every organization that gets at least 10 positive reviews during the month of February will get some media love courtesy of Guidestar, which is one of the most respected information sources in the nonprofit community. (Unfortunately, the site only covers the work of arts nonprofits, not commercial firms, individuals or fiscally sponsored organizations, but hopefully you’ll still be able to find some to review.) So please, visit the site, find some organizations that you like, and tell the world about them! It will help show the broader nonprofit community that arts organizations DO exist and do real work that matters to a lot of people.

And while you’re at it, if anyone wants to throw a rave our way, we won’t stop you!