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Steve's Blog

Peer Index Marketing: Targeting Influencers in the Audience
Posted on August 15, 2011 by Steve

From Azeem Azhar, founder and CEO of Peer Index, on gigaom.com:

Marketers have long believed that some customers have a disproportionate influence on others when it comes to purchase decisions, and they have tried different strategies to identify and target those customers. Indeed McKinsey & Co. reckons 20-50 percent of purchases involve a peer reference.
Barry's Blog Continues with Arts Education Policy
Posted on August 10, 2011 by Steve

Barry's second question for the policy panel:

Many contend that arts education advocacy has largely been a failure. Others disagree. Where are the successes? Where will funding come from in the future to implement policy?

Read the responses.

Session Details Now Available on GIA Conference Website
Posted on August 10, 2011 by Steve

Full details of the GIA 2011 Conference Sessions are now available from the conference website. You can now see when individual session will occur and who the presenters will be, as well as any online resources associated with them.

conference.giarts.org/sessions.html.

Sebastian Ruth on Classical Music as Force for Social Justice
Posted on August 8, 2011 by Steve

Violinist and MacArthur Fellow Sebastian Ruth is profiled on the String Visions website. In 1997, Ruth founded Community MusicWorks, a non-profit based in the West End neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island. For fourteen years, CMW and Sebastian Ruth have empowered the lives of urban youth and families through classical music.

Gutted Kansas Arts Commission Seeks Continued NEA Support
Posted on August 8, 2011 by Steve

From a Lawrence Journal-World editorial:

The Kansas Arts Commission still exists, but it has no money and no staff to administer its program. Judging from last week’s meeting, it also appears that commission members have little idea how they will move forward.
Barry's Blog Turns to Policy Discussion for Week 3
Posted on August 8, 2011 by Steve

Barry Hessenius's blog at Westaf has spent the past two weeks focused on Arts Education in the context of Practice and Fieldbuilding. This week the discussion turns to Policy with a new panel of respondents:

  • Janet Brown, Executive Director, Grantmakers in the Arts
  • Cyrus Driver, Program Learning and Innovation, Ford Foundation
  • Bob Lynch, President and CEO, Americans for the Arts
  • Narric Rome, Senior Director for Federal Affairs and Arts Education, Americans for the Arts
  • Laurie Schell, outgoing Executive Director, California Alliance for Arts Education
NEA Announces Our Town Communities Website
Posted on August 5, 2011 by Steve

The latest addition to the National Endowment for the Arts web site is a full section devoted to the Our Town Communities where you will find photos and more information about the 51 creative placemaking projects recently awarded NEA grants to support community development through the arts and design.

http://www.arts.gov/national/ourtown/

Webcasts Next Week on Funding Opportunities for Nonprofit Arts Organizations from HUD
Posted on August 4, 2011 by Steve

Nonprofit arts organizations are invited to attend two webcasts—on Thursday, August 11 and Friday, August 12—about funding opportunities through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities (OSHC). OSHC recently issued two Notices of Funding Availability (NOFA) for their FY 2011 Community Challenge Grants Program ($95 million in grants available) and FY 2011 Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program ($28 million available).

Barry's Blog Week 2: Fieldbuilding for Arts Education
Posted on August 4, 2011 by Steve

This week's beat is Fieldbuilding, and the second question posed to the participants is this:

How is the field addressing barriers to arts education beyond budget decreases – the need for relevant assessment and accountability methods, lack of equity and access, high turnover of education and arts leadership, the unspoken territorial divide between arts education people and the general nonprofit arts sector, and the history of the arts education segment’s ability to organize itself? How do we get to innovation in the field?
Charitable Deduction Not Touched in Debt-Ceiling Deal
Posted on August 3, 2011 by Steve

From Lisa Chiu and Suzanne Perry at The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

A new law to increase the debt-ceiling limit does not make any changes in the tax deduction that donors receive for making charitable gifts...

“We assume that the new committee will certainly consider the cap on deductions,” said Jason Lee, a lawyer for the Association of Fundraising Professionals, a trade group that is opposed to reducing the value of the charitable deduction. “So we’re working under the premise that we still have our work cut out for us.”