Tuesday, May 22, 2018
FastCompany had an article about Five Ways Non Profits Struggle last month. Most of the things mentioned aren’t really news to you if you work in non profits: Restrictions on how grant…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 08:48PMHat tip to Artsjournal.com linking to an Arts Professional article all performing arts professionals should read. Hull Truck Theatre in Hull, England started regular pop-up box office hours …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 02:32AMThursday, May 17, 2018
When I was thinking about what to write today, I figured a good intersection between yesterday’s post about productive employees not necessarily being good manager material and Drew Mc…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:36AMWednesday, May 16, 2018
Last month in Harvard Business Review, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman wrote about how the most productive employees don’t make the best managers. Of the seven qualities they had listed…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:12AMTuesday, May 15, 2018
I just rediscovered a CityLab story I bookmarked last September discussing how a woman’s effort to revitalize culture and creativity in York, PA started in her apartment. Bored with th…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:04AMThursday, May 10, 2018
Barry Hessenius proved that we often don’t think of the most obvious things in a post he made last weekend encouraging people to create Story Banks to support your advocacy work. Rathe…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:12AMTuesday, May 8, 2018
Yesterday, Non Profit Quarterly had an article mentioning that a goodly number of non-profit organizations had their $10,000 Adwords Grants shutdown by Google for not meeting standards that …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:36PMIn the last week I have seen mention of Museum Hack, in both Bloomberg (h/t Artsjournal.com) and Washington Post (h/t Nina Simon). The company does customized tours of museums from a particu…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 03:18AMThursday, May 3, 2018
Lest you think Carter Gillies and I are lone voices arguing against the use of economic impact of arts and culture as a measure of their value to society, in March the Global Education and…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 01:18AMWednesday, May 2, 2018
Via CityLab is a NY Times story about how the Boyle Heights community in Los Angeles has recently hosted a “play street.” The program, which apparently started in London, shuts d…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:54AMTuesday, May 1, 2018
Back in February I wrote about how the Akron Art Museum and Akron-Summit County Public Library were teaming up to lend art to local residents. At the time, the only other similar program I w…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:36AMThursday, April 26, 2018
Over the last few years, I have frequently written about the problem with using metrics as a measure of value and performance. As long as we continue to be told that use of quantitative me…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 04:54AMTuesday, April 24, 2018
I have written before about the visual arts fair I started about two years ago to provide an opportunity for students and artists in the community to sell their work and get experiencing tal…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:33PMMonday, April 23, 2018
Intriguing video came across the old social media feed today in the form of a review calling the visual art oriented MMO Occupy White Walls as “The Weirdest MMO I Have Every Played.…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:06PMI wrote about Giving Circles on my personal blog last June, noting that the number of Giving Circles in the U.S. is growing. The appeal of this form of philanthropy is that it that the struc…
SOURCE: artshacker.com at 10:36AMThursday, April 19, 2018
Hat tip to Nina Simon for calling attention to a post about how the Barnes Foundation is working toward changing their user experience. Even though the Barnes Foundation art collection was m…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:24AMWednesday, April 18, 2018
Short post today because I just returned home after serving on a grant review panel for the state arts council. The deputy director of the council was reminiscing about the days in the not s…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:05AMMonday, April 16, 2018
In his reflections on attending the 2018 Nonprofit Technology Conference, Drew McManus noted how many presenters at the conference packed too much text on to Powerpoint slides. He observes t…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 11:42PMWednesday, April 11, 2018
For over a year now I have been excited about the session on writing Requests for Proposals (RFP) Drew McManus and Ceci Dadisman are presenting today at the NonProfit Technology conference s…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 08:34PMTuesday, April 10, 2018
I don’t know what inspired me to do so, but last week I visited ProPublica’s website and learned that Free Street Theater and ProPublica Illinois were teaming up to offer theater…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 07:22PMMonday, April 9, 2018
Last week Arts Midwest held a webinar to provide some examples of the way in which different arts organizations were putting the Creating Connection messaging and research into practice. The…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 08:28PMThursday, April 5, 2018
I was recently involved with a strategic planning session for a non-arts group where staff and representatives of community constituencies were intermingled at different tables. When we …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 12:05AMTuesday, April 3, 2018
Back in February CityLab covered an effort by residents of the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, MN to get people invested in contributing to the Small Area Plan for their neighborhood. T…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 07:23PMMonday, April 2, 2018
A common complaint in live performing arts is that no one has an attention span anymore. The sense is that cell phones, videos, bright flashing lights, etc have ruined our brains. But accord…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 08:31PMWednesday, March 28, 2018
Hat tip to Andrew Taylor for calling attention to ever awesome Springboard for the Arts’ “Year In Review” report which consists of a short letter from Executive Director La…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:06PMTuesday, March 27, 2018
A couple weeks ago Ali Webb wrote the provocatively titled Philanthropy’s Seven Deadly Sins on Non-Profit Quarterly. According to Webb they are, Blindness to privilege Dismissing community…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:23PMMonday, March 26, 2018
Last month the BBC had a story on their site about the creative benefits of being a loner. One reason for this is that such people are likely to spend sustained time alone working on their c…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:04PMWednesday, March 21, 2018
National Geographic had a photo essay featuring pictures of ballet dancers in Nairobi’s largest slum. As I looked at it, I was reminded of El Sistema, the effort that provided free m…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:13PMTuesday, March 20, 2018
Really interesting research piece on Plos One asking if the arts are the “secret sauce” that helps drive innovation or if it is the nice to have “cherry on top.” They…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 09:00PMMonday, March 19, 2018
Though it was only a week ago, I can’t quite recall where I came across a link to Ozan Varol’s post, “Stop asking children these seven questions (and ask these instead)R…
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 10:15PMWednesday, March 14, 2018
I recently had a piece on ArtsHacker addressing questions about copyright which I see as a complement to an earlier piece I wrote for ArtsHacker that directed readers to tools that can help …
SOURCE: Butts In The Seats at 08:32PM 
