Americans for the Arts

On November 4, arts and business leaders from all over the US commended twelve exceptional businesses for their commitment to the arts at the BCA 10 awards in New York City. Now that the awards are over, the black ties have come off and the awardees have returned to their respective home bases. But from Iowa to Oregon, the celebration of these exceptional businesses shows no signs of stopping.

In Cincinnati, Strata-G continues to celebrate by renewing their commitment to supporting the arts. The company is launching a campaign to offer two Cincinnati area arts organizations their marketing services, pro-bono, for a full year. "Being nominated for and winning the BCA 10 award further reinforced in us the role that business can play in supporting area non-profits,” Strata-G managing partner Jeff Eberlein said. “We wanted to step up once again and show our gratitude to and support worthy arts organizations.” Strata-G earned a BCA 10 award for providing over $75,000 in pro-bono services to arts organizations in 2009 alone. And in Oregon, Portland General Electric is being honored at Business and Culture for the Arts’ Breakfast of Champions, where Portland Mayor Sam Adams will re-present the BCA 10 award to PGE CEO Jim Piro. "PGE believes the arts have the power to educate, heal and create a vibrant economy and has long demonstrated a dedication to incorporating the arts in its corporate culture while also encouraging other businesses to follow suit,” said Virginia Willard, Business for Culture & the Art's executive director.

I’ve been reading and seeing a lot about creativity and innovation lately. Here are five items that I thought are worth sharing. What do you have to add to the list? What great examples are you seeing of how the arts are inspiring creativity in your communities?

1. In an article in Fast Company, Nike CEO Mark Parker talks about the dinners he regularly hosts with artists to kick around ideas.  
2. At our annual convention in Baltimore, Jonathan Spector, President of The Conference Board, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2B0bSBCvJY) spoke about the role of an arts education in instilling the creative thinking which is needed to bring about the productivity and innovation which everyone business leaders is looking for these days.
3. CEOs interviewed in The 2010 IBM Global CEO Study list creativity as the most important leadership competency needed to manage in an increasing complex world.
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Marete Wester

With New York City baking in the east coast heatwave for most of the month of July, it was refreshing to head to the relatively cool, rainy, high mountains of Aspen, CO, in August for the third Americans for the Arts Seminar for Leadership in the Arts, held in collaboration with the Harman-Eisner Program in the Arts. 

This year’s program entitled “The Artful Entrepreneur: Exploring Philanthropic Innovations for Arts and Culture in the 21st Century" attracted 30 arts philanthropists, corporate and foundation leaders, arts administrators, and activists to the Aspen Institute.

Hailing from a wide range of diverging experiences, the participants ranged from individual arts patrons to foundation executives to venture capitalists, from grassroots community leaders to cultural policy experts to board members involved in major cultural capital campaigns. They rolled up their sleeves and spent two days wrestling with the particularly disturbing idea that on top of the arts losing their traditional philanthropic market share, we are also not on the radar screens of the growing number of social entrepreneurs who are sending their venture philanthropy dollars to causes other than the arts. What we can do to collectively change the trend was the question at hand?

Keely Saye

Is the failure of the arts to maintain market share among providers of contributed support a short-term problem related to increased social service, health, and educational needs, or will it persist?

In my opinion, the question must be considered from two different perspectives. In reference to the short term, the answer would appear to be an unqualified yes. This can be considered a "short-term" problem in that it is one that has arisen relatively recently. Fundraising in the non-profit/arts sector, particularly in the performing arts, has seldom been more difficult than it is right now.

Deep pocket donors and corporate benefactors are being stretched to the limit as even some of the more venerable arts institutions such as Pasadena Playhouse (The State Theatre Of California) are closing their doors due to lack of operating funds. Shrinking audiences, most likely kept away by the cost of admission, have forced many arts organizations to look to their donor bases for increased assistance. Unfortunately, that donor base is dealing with the same economy as the absent ticketholder, and must also make cuts. The arts are often the first (perceived) extras to be trimmed from most budgets. In this sense, the answer is clearly "yes, we are facing a short-term problem." The question that seems begged in the final four words of the initial query is how do we keep it from persisting?

Whether or not you’re engage in social networking, there’s a good chance you have come across a crowd-sourced corporate philanthropy contest (such as Chase Community Giving, Pepsi Refresh, or the American Express Members’ Project) sometime in the last few months. These initiatives, in which companies award funding to the nonprofit or nonprofits that earn the most votes via Facebook, Twitter, or the company’s own website, are sparking discussion in nonprofit and philanthropy circles. Most recently, James Epstein-Reeves’ editorial in Forbes outlines the pros and cons of the crowd-sourced corporate philanthropy model. (The June 2010 issue of BCA News [.pdf 873 KB] also covered the topic.) So, what’s the consensus? Is the crowd-sourced philanthropy model the wave of the future?

In some ways, crowd-sourced philanthropy seems like a win-win for both companies and non-profits. For businesses, crowd-sourced philanthropy contests don’t simply promote positive brand recognition, but also stimulate consumer engagement (especially in examples such as American Express and Pepsi, where consumers/participants log on and vote for nonprofits in different rounds, meaning they will keep returning to the company’s website or Facebook page). On the nonprofit side, Epstein-Reeves points out that these contests help level the playing field by allowing nonprofits who previously may have been ineligible for corporate grants access to the funding and branding power gained from association with the corporation, as well as national recognition that typically does not come from the award of a more traditional grant.

Valerie Beaman

Last year at the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in Seattle, funders and arts organizations alike were in a panic about the economy and draconian cuts in arts support and services.

This year in Baltimore, while the economic picture remains challenging, clear progress was evident as funders and arts organizations discussed new ways of adapting and shifting models. It’s all about collaboration and the blurring of lines between private and public, for profit and nonprofit, high art versus populist art.

This past year, the Obama administration brought in film artists to help brainstorm on a solution for capping BP’s gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Rocco Landesman, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, talked to cabinet leaders asking how can the arts help with their problems, which developed into a partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development  and the Department of Transportation.

Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange is working with the U.S. Navy on a huge arts-based learning project. And Peter Sellars, stage, film, and festival director, wants to know why shouldn’t artists bring their creativity to bear on solving the ills of the California prison system. Why not, indeed?

In April at the Arts Education Partnership National Forum, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated that “the arts can no longer be treated as a frill.” Of course we in the arts community know that art education cultivates critical thinking and analysis skills. But business leaders are also realizing how urgent the need for increased arts education in our schools has become.

During “Arts Education and the Innovative Workforce,” our recent webinar in partnership with The Conference Board, telecom entrepreneur and Qualcomm co-founder Harvey White reinforced Duncan’s statement by stressing that if America’s workforce is to remain competitive on a global level, art education is indeed not a frill but an economic necessity. White quoted former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, who stated that in the future, businesses will seek out employees that can “solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”  The technical skills that students learn through STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) subjects are certainly necessary, and even align with arts education—after all the objective of engineering is to creatively solve problems using science and math. However, STEM alone cannot provide all of the critical analysis and creative problem solving skills that future business leaders will require to succeed in the global economy.

Valerie Beaman

With arts budgets ranging from flat to drastically reduced, it is hard to imagine using this difficult time as a period of investment, but in Community Foundation of Central Florida, Inc. President and CEO Mark Brewer’s blog Investors versus Contributors, he spoke of the need for arts organizations to use this low time in our economy to do as businesses do – invest in infrastructure to be ready when the market returns. But how is this possible with lack of funds and reduced staff?

I was reminded of Mark’s post when I saw the recently released 2010 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey. The report cites the Corporation for National & Community Service’s statistics that cash giving in the United States has declined for the past two years, but the volunteerism rate is increasing. While not all business investors are focused on the arts, the Deloitte survey shows they are quite clearly focused on alleviating social needs of their communities – often with skills-based volunteering of their staff.

Since Day 1 of my internship at Americans for the Arts, I have toiled to digest the information detailed in the National Arts Index: The good …the bearable, and the…unsavory. This report measures the health and vitality of arts and culture in America. My status so far, is ‘processing.’ Nonetheless, the NAI exposes compelling realities. One in particular caught my eye:  “Nonprofit arts organizations are losing their ‘market share’ of philanthropy to other charitable areas.” The share of corporate and foundation funding directed toward the arts has decreased from 10.3 to 4.6 percent and 14.8 to 10.6 percent between 1998 and 2007 respectively. I would hate to acknowledge the existence of even a tinge of competition among nonprofit organizations for planned giving. But if there was a competition for funding in the cause world, we would be losing. We spend hours upon end explaining why the arts are important. The Private Sector Blog Salon, held March 8-12, offered tools to strengthen your case for arts funding among private contributors. But for some reason, the arts are still overlooked as a legitimate cause. The arts do not build houses, feed the poor, dig for wells, etc. Right? Wrong.

Marete Wester

I love the spring for many reasons. For one, it often marks the start when the Americans for the Arts staff members begin receiving requests to meet with international visitors who are traveling in the United States. I love the visits, because it is always a fascinating opportunity to learn about cultural policy across the globe—from Iraq to South Korea to Germany.

In addition to government support in the United States, the question we are asked most often is, “How does our private sector model of support for the arts work?” It is no secret that in other countries throughout the world it is usually the government that is the largest patron of arts and culture. However, it is fair to say that many countries are putting increasing pressure on their cultural sector to think about how businesses and corporations and philanthropy can play a greater role in their support.

For better or worse, because the public/private sector support system is firmly embedded in our cultural DNA, we are the model the rest of the world comes here to learn more about.

I have just had the pleasure of attending the “Great Ideas Conference” sponsored by ASAE and the Center of Association Leadership.  While the main focus of the conference was sharing new and exciting ideas in the association world, a lot of attention was focused to online giving and fundraising strategies.  Not only the importance of embracing these new methods of giving through mobile texting and social media, but also how businesses should link these fundraising efforts with their marketing plan.  So, you have implemented these great tools and strategies (Blog, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to cultivate a broad base of donors, now what?  Don’t stop there!  It is just as important to close the loop on these efforts by tracking your new media efforts regularly.   Sure, we can do the basic math and compare the monetary contribution as it relates to each social tool but what will this tell you about the leads you have created?  Who are the donors going to your site and how are they getting there?  Here is a collection of free tools from Hubspot that evaluate the effectiveness of various marketing initiatives which will hopefully guide you in this final step of your new media fundraising strategy.

American Express and cause-related website TakePart.com have chosen to feature Americans for the Arts as one of only 10 Arts & Culture organizations in their new social media Members Project campaign. The participation of Americans for the Arts means added visibility and exposure for our organization and its work in arts advocacy and other critical programs, but also a chance to win a $200,000 award from American Express. TakePart.com is a go-to site for volunteering and donating in a variety of topics and causes and is the social action network of Participant Media, the social change-oriented media company behind An Inconvenient Truth and Food Inc.

The Americans for the Arts page of the Member Project can be found here, with links to registering for TakePart.com and for voting in the campaign which runs through May 24, 2010. If you have a Facebook account, you can easily register from this page through Facebook Connect.

In reading all the great content here over the past few days, I’ve learned a lot. And I’ve had some new thoughts as well, inspired by others. So now, in honor of Broadway’s Hitchcock parody, I’ve come up with my own to-do list – 39 Next Steps, if you will – to build more private sector engagement of the arts here in Portland.

One of the themes of the blog posts this week has been about “telling our stories” in ways that resonate with corporate partners for the 21st century.   I want to tell the story of a small town Wisconsin arts organization that to me, defines the story that we should be telling about the arts to our corporate partners and everyone else.  The Northern Lakes Center for the Arts in Amery, population 2,777, located in beautiful northwestern Wisconsin about 65 miles from St. Paul, MN, is one of the most vibrant arts centers in Wisconsin, or anywhere.  The Center is a nationally recognized hub for the arts that truly involves its community in arts experiences on so many levels.

The Northern Lakes Center receives funding from plenty of public and private sources, but it earns income in ways that should serve as a model and inspiration for the future.   The Northern Lakes Center is the publisher for the weekly community paper in Clayton, WI (a smaller town about ten miles from Amery), a service which satisfies Clayton’s need for a community-based newspaper and, which brings in a good chunk of change for the Center each month from advertising and subscriptions. 

First, John Killacky, I’m so jealous that you blogged from and about Salzburg, birthplace of Mozart and imaginary home of the Von Trapps. Second, I sensed a thread through many of the rich posts—notably Margy Waller’s and Barry Hessenius’—about the importance of telling an arts story that resonates and is relevant to listeners.

What is the connection between Salzburg and The Hurt Locker?  I believe it’s about authenticity and identity.

I was inspired to connect the dots by John Cloys’ “Big Thing$ Come in Small Packages” and Mark Brewer’s “Finding Passionate Art Investors.” The challenge for the arts community is that we are currently caught in the “in-between.” Most institutions are trapped between the old fundraising techniques that we’ve practiced for the past thirty years and younger givers used to the new technologies of cyberspace.  We are “in-between” the generational gap of traditional donors who want their names on projects and buildings and a younger generation that wants to be totally involved and make community change with cell phones and ipods in hand.

One of our challenges is to position traditional arts institutions not as “entitlements for giving” but as agents for community development, cultural growth and economic expansion. This means a change in operations, marketing and programs. Younger, leaner, and more “hip” organizations may have the upper hand in their appeal to the new generation of givers. Ethnic-centric organizations have the ability to promote cultural diversity and understanding through their art that appeals to a generation that has grown up with a better reality of how our communities have changed.

This week, hundreds of people met in Providence to discuss “Connecting Creative Communities” in New England.

While there, I had the chance to share our new research with the audience. The response was inspiring. So many people there seemed to recognize the polite head nodding we get when talking about ROI of the arts in dollars and cents. Like us, they also know it isn’t persuasive enough to decision-makers. So, the arts remain a vulnerable policy choice in the public arena.

Expanding on my first post, we need to:

1. Identify what business wants from, thinks about, and considers the obstacles, challenges and opportunities to continued, substantive talks between the two sectors, and;
2. Ascertain what changes in the arts sector’s approach to building meaningful coalitions and collaborative efforts are essential prerequisites to address the business community’s needs. 

This knowledge would help the arts sector to move the status of potential collaborative efforts from the current “conceptual level” to more active status by developing strategies that could move towards specific action steps in fostering working alliances – by designing action steps that are in alignment with stated business needs.   Specifically, it is incumbent on the arts sector to fully understand and appreciate what factors the business community identifies as essential for its involvement to be of benefit to them.

That kind of inquiry might include the following discussions with business:

Last month I joined colleagues from around the world to attend the Salzburg Global Seminar: “The Performing Arts in Lean Times:  Opportunities for Reinvention.” Adrian Ellis and Russell Willis Taylor co-chaired the convening. Several ideas from this meeting may be relevant to our blogosphere discussions. First the context: we were lodged in Max Reinhart’s castle. This is the building that stood in for the Von Trapp villa featured in the movie version of “The Sound of Music.” And, of course, there’s Salzburg, itself: Mozart’s birthplace in the Austrian Alps -- totally fabulous! Now, here are some tidbits from our conversations, as well as my observations. First off, lean times in the West snapped into perspective when a Zambian playwright reminded us that people in her country live on two dollars a day. This starkly contrasted with the news from a Hong Kong government administrator who privately shared that his city is increasing its (already) multi-billion dollar investment in culture.

The first question (suggested topic) posed for this panel blogging on the Private Sector relationship was: How to define the relevance of the arts to business in the face of urgent and basic social needs. Once again we make the mistake of always approaching the business relationship from the perspective of our needs and not theirs. It is, think, an arrogant conceit and a strategic misstep to always approach this issue from what we want and need.

For three decades, the nonprofit arts sector has been seeking – with very limited success – to capitalize on intersections between it and the corporate / business community. The vast majority of efforts in this arena have been small and localized (i.e., individual arts organizations attempting to build bridges and form partnerships / alliances on individual, isolated projects, often limited to seeking corporate sponsorships; or Arts & Business Council/Business Committee for the Arts initiatives, for which arts organizations have shown far more enthusiasm than businesses). Larger forays into the promotion of sector wide collaborations have principally been limited to periodic dialogue characterized by the most general of precepts; lacking specificity, strategic / practical next steps, and any timeline for the accomplishment of specific agenda items. 

When talking about private sector or corporate funding .… it occurred to me that we toss around the word corporation like there is one person on the other end of that word. And indeed, corporation is derived from the Latin word for body “corpus”, with one definition of corporation as ‘any group of persons united or regarded as united in one body’.

However, for the arts organizations that seek funding in today’s environment, this definition poses a conundrum. Who is the corpus in corporation? In the recent past, arts support might have come through a champion in the company’s executive offices, or through the corporate foundation. It was easier to navigate the decision maker (s) for philanthropic support when funding dollars were coming from one source.

But corporations are not made up of one individual. They are made of many individuals, just as the definition states. These individuals are in positions of authority. They have their own operating budgets, their own P&L statements, and decide, on a day to day basis, the budget dollars spent.

Continuing from my first blog post...

Feeling like we'd leveled off in our effort to build broad support for the arts, we decided to get more information. We studied how people think about the arts -- that is, we engaged in some real research over the past 18 months. With this information, we’re crafting a new communications strategy—one built on a deeper understanding of the best ways to communicate about the arts—that we believe will lead to increased shared responsibility and motivate action in support of the arts.

In order to create a more constructive dialog, we had to explore the dynamics of the current public conversation—in the media, for instance—as well as in the thinking of the majority of people who do not focus on the arts in their daily lives. Understanding attitudes and beliefs more deeply is a key to negotiating them more successfully in future efforts. A new argument, or lens, on the issue is useful to the extent that it can move people to a collective perspective and shared action in support of the arts.

When legislators, business leaders, community leaders, and others all take in the same core message seen through the same lens—and in turn repeat them to their own constituencies—the resulting echo chamber can begin to transform the accepted common sense on the issue.

The benefits that the arts bring our communities are extensive, but often the value is difficult to appreciate or not readily measurable. It is for this reason, cultural community leaders need to communicate the economic value of the arts and speak in the language of the corporate community by offering research and quantitative facts to compete for funding dollars.

Americans for the Arts is a prolific source of this information which can be used to build a case for arts funding. But, in building that case, one needs a few research tools in their toolbox.