Interesting thoughts from Jack Shafer in Slate about the current lot of newspapers, and their loss of ''social currency.'' Says he:

The phrase, which comes from sociology, is often used to describe the information we acquire and then trade -- or give away -- to start, maintain, and nurture relationships with our fellow humans.

Although printed newspapers used to be the ATM machines of social currency, he argues, the on-line world of social networks and blogs have taken on the task more quickly and more efficiently. Of course, the quest for knowledge tidbits for cocktail conversation and dinner parties is only one of the motivations to read a newspaper. And there are many dynamic forces at play in the newspaper's current struggles.

Although the story is about newspapers, it carries to arts and culture, as well. Arts attendance used to be a significant source of social currency, as well, especially among the elite. What artist or performance you had seen (and who you had seen there) were part of the public self you sought to maintain, and a portion of the conversation you were expected to engage.

On-line interaction and social networking has also grabbed a large volume of that real estate. And live attendance has lost one of its claims for attention (don't worry, we've got others).

So, how do you compete against social networking and on-line social currency? One way is to ensure that your brand of culture is available as an element of that on-line world. Case-in-point: ArtShare, an application for Facebook that allows any user to ''hang'' great works of art (from major real-world museums) in their public profile. The user gets to select works that match their tastes or their preferred public identity. The museum gets an on-line plug and a tacit endorsement of its organizational value.

Ka-ching.

It's always a challenge to convey the experience and emotion of one medium in the language of another medium (dare we call it an art?). But as attempts go, this one for the Zürich Chamber Orchestra isn't bad at all.

Thanks, Neal, for the link!

Okay, it's a bit too late for beach reading, but CPAs everywhere are likely devouring its every nuance. The revised, redesigned, and reconsidered IRS 990 form and instructions -- a required annual filing for any nonprofit with gross receipts of $1 million or more, or total assets of $2.5 million or more at the end of the tax year (nonprofits with lesser budgets fill out the 990EZ or the cute little 990-N) -- has finally been unleashed upon the world.

It may seem like the pinnacle of tedium, but such redesigns of the reporting requirements have a rather dramatic impact on how the nonprofit world works (the last major revision of the 990 was in 1979, the year Skylab fell to earth... Coincidence? I think not.). These rules define the lens through which we see and understand a large part of the nonprofit infrastructure -- how donors evaluate potential recipients, how foundations map their strategy, how nonprofits describe and track their financial life.

If you're interested in the specifics of the redesign, Charity Governance has a thoughtful overview. Or, just print out the new form and instructions and curl up in your jammies tonight for a good read.

The New York Times article and the corresponding blog entry may be a few months old, but they're still worth a moment, as they flag a different future than many in philanthropy have been awaiting. ''8 Reasons You Should Not Expect an Inheritance'' in the Times and ''Transfer WHAT wealth?'' in Philanthropy 2173 suggest that the great generational transfer of wealth we've been awaiting like the Great White Whale may be more like a grouper than a whale.

Over the past decade or so, financial planners and development officers have been drooling over the transfer of accumulated wealth from Boomers to their children. Said this article back in 2004:

...by the year 2052, an estimated $40.6 trillion will change hands as Baby Boomers and their parents pass on their accumulated assets to their heirs.

The transfer meant freshly wealthy donors, and newly eager financial management clients. But, as it turns out, it's more expensive to get older than it used to be. Asks Lucy Bernholz:

So...what happens if the transfer happens but the money goes to things like housing and education costs? Or if the transfer doesn't happen because it is really expensive to live forever as some baby boomers are planning?

It might be good time to revisit your capital gift projections (and planned giving cash flows) for the next decade to be sure they're free of Boomer-transfer enthusiasm.

UPDATE: If this doesn't shake your predictive capacity, consider the possible impact of repealing the estate tax [ thanks Michael ].

Yesterday, I was a typical schmoe, with a university day job, a blog, and a mortgage. Today, I am the 11th most powerful person in the nonprofit arts. I hope it comes with valet parking!

The old British expression, ''horses for courses,'' references the fact that certain race horses run better on certain tracks (dirt, mud, etc.). A primary challenge of the thoroughbred owner was therefore matching the horse to the course for the best results. The idiom now suggests that you match the right people to the task, or the right strategy to the goal.

In professional-grade arts and culture, however, we've bet disproportionately on a single horse -- the nonprofit, tax-exempt, 501c3, board-governed, vaguely hierarchical, and formally organized critter we call the professional nonprofit. It's not a bad horse, and it continues to run well on certain courses. But we've rarely explored (at least in the past decades) the other means of transportation at our disposal for the range of terrains we now are navigating.

Even if we were to have that conversation, we'd likely limit the options to a certain genus -- the formal organization or institution with explicit goals. We would encourage arts enthusiasts and professionals to match the organizational form to the task at hand, whether it was nonprofit, for-profit, private, public, corporate, limited liability company, partnership, co-operative, sole proprietorship, or hybrid.

But as Clay Shirky so elegantly suggests in his TED talk from 2005 (and in his related book, Here Comes Everybody, which I've talked up before), such an exploration would miss completely an increasingly viable option for fostering, producing, stewarding, delivering, and interpreting cultural expression -- not with an institution or organization, at all, but through non-planned and emergent coordination of distributed individuals.

Watch Shirky's talk and you'll get the larger gist: That many collective endeavors that used to require institutions no longer require them (and in fact, those institutions are now often blocking productive activity rather than advancing it), and that many collective endeavors that used to be impossible or improbable are now possible and even probable given the proper social tools.

Why is this an important issue for advocates, managers, and supporters of creative expression and cultural experience? Because if you're using an institution or organization when you don't need to, you're dragging around all sorts of extra costs and complications that sap your energy and diffuse your purpose. If you could select, with elegance and intent, the most appropriate organizational structure or non-organizational system for the goal you have in mind, you might find that you're moving with the tides rather than across them.

The formal, strategic, and structured nonprofit organization will remain an important option for non-market-supported, professional-grade artistic expression. But if we truly love our art forms and hope to foster their vital future, we might occasionally choose to leave that particular horse in the stable.

If your work in arts and cultural management includes a concern for arts in public education (and it should, by the way), you need to understand and engage with education policy at every level. At the national level, that means understanding the hopes and problems the No Child Left Behind Act, passed by congress and signed by the president in 2001.

To catch you up on the conversation, NewTalk hosted this on-line discussion earlier this month. Has the federal legislation -- heavy on testing and process requirements -- improved the education system and promoted a full range of learning styles and disciplines (including arts and culture), or has it impeded such progress? According to one participant, Diane Ravitch of the NYU Steinhardt School of Education, the answer seems to be ''not'':

Teachers know that the curriculum has been narrowed, that the time available for the study of the arts, history, science, geography, and every other non-tested subject has been reduced. They know that the law's laser-like focus on test scores in reading and mathematics has led to constant test-preparation, which has replaced instruction. When time devoted to testing the basic skills crowds out every other kind of learning, this is not good education.

Education policy is dense, complex, and full of hidden assumptions and values. But given its importance and longterm impact, it's worth a deep dive to understand and engage in your work in the arts.

[ Thanks to Richard Kessler for the link...and for his ArtsJournal blog on the subject! ]

Because arts and cultural organizations are so often creatures of place -- serving a geographic region or community more often than not -- it's worth watching how the ''sense of place'' is evolving in our audiences, our artists, and our other constituents. Obviously, the Internet has reconfigured place -- who cares where the information or its author ''lives'' these days? But it seems clear that we're just at the beginning of that transformation.

Case in point: ''cloud computing,'' which has been around for a decade or so, but has recently invaded our common sphere (sometimes without us noticing). In a nutshell, cloud computing involves the collective capacity of thousands or millions of computers on a network, taking on tasks that used to require a place-based system (like your desktop computer, or a research supercomputer).

The ''cloud'' metaphor comes from the vague and vaporous nature of the data storage, processing, and distribution in these systems -- it doesn't actually matter where your data is, since you can access it from pretty much anywhere.

The most popular example these days is Google Docs (descriptive video here), which provides word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation functions without the need for a hard disk or local software on your computer. But with the explosion of lower-power and smaller computing devices (like the iPhone or Blackberry), the cloud is growing to include all sorts of formerly local functions -- even broadcast radio.

Why is this evolution important to computing and communications, says this article:

A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information. At the most basic level, it's the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities.

Why is this evolution important to arts and cultural managers? Just talk to your kids (or other people's kids...with their permission) about where their computer files are, about where the information they access ''lives,'' and about whether their home computer is a stand-alone device. They  may not even understand what ''stand-alone'' means.

The Internet and cloud computing transform the lens we all use (and especially the lens our children use) to view and understand the world. That changes how they will view information and content providers from now on. And it changes how even local, geographically bound arts institutions will work.

As the social world becomes increasingly connected and complex, and as social issues and responses to them begin to intertwine, the discipline of design is becoming an essential toolset for anyone hoping to make a positive difference. Gone are the days, if they ever were here, when you could create an isolated response to a specific challenge without considering the unintended consequences of your actions, or the larger context and constituency it affected.

We often think of ''design'' as an endeavor for physical objects -- ergonomics, utility, aesthetics all rolled into one. But the very same tools of observation, interpretation, innovation, and evaluation have proven essential for organizational structure and strategy, social interaction, and organizational and public policy.

To help design firms engage in social issues, IDEO and Rockefeller Foundation have created a new Guide and Workbook in PDF format. While intended for design professionals, the publications also provide a handy overview of where design and social impact meet.

How does this inform cultural management? Like it or not, arts organizations are engines of social impact -- gathering individuals, resources, and organizational structures to create new expressions, reshape the nature of social interaction in communities, and foster exploration and learning about what it means to be human. If that's not a process that demands a design eye, I'm not sure what is.

Worth a read.

Consumer segmentation systems have been around for a long while now in the commercial world. The junk mail you receive, the special on-line offers that clutter your inbox, even your in-store experiences are all influenced by the market segment you've been assigned -- whether your among the ''Young Digerati," the ''Multi-Culti Mosaic,'' or the ''Shotguns & Pickups.''

Market segmentation systems gather all sorts of behavioral, economic, and social data and cluster people into bite-size chunks of marketing fodder, to increase efficiency in communications, and to clarify and hone the development of new products and services.

If the thought makes you queasy, get used to it.

Many nonprofits and even nonprofit arts organizations have also used segmentation models for decades now, usually drafting on the segments developed for consumer markets. A few consulting firms (like AMS Planning & Research) have adapted and adopted these models for arts marketing and planning. But there hasn't been much publicly available that specifically relates to arts and culture audiences, patrons, and donors.

Thankfully, the gang at WolfBrown have decided to share theirs with the world. Building on the Value and Impact Study I mentioned a while back, they've developed market segments not only for ticket buyers, but for donors, as well.

How might you use the systems? Just imagine how your marketing and messaging might be different if you were speaking to a potential audience of ''Mavericks" or of "Serenity Seekers." Or, imagine how your development approach might vary toward ''Intrinsics,'' ''Networkers'', ''Co-Creators'', ''Marquee Donors,'' or ''Youth-Focused'' donors.

Will the new segments be useful? Only time will tell if the methodology produced productively unique clusters of values and preferences. But in the meanwhile, just the exercise of reviewing your organization's engagement strategies against these archetypes should be well worth the time.

Give them a read! (scroll down the page to the ''Segmentation Study'').