Nonprofit job site OpportunityKnocks.org has posted the 2008 edition of its Nonprofit Retention and Vacancy Report (found via Philanthropy Journal), with an equal mix of good news and bad. The good news: Their survey of nonprofits found an average turnover rate of 21 percent, less than half of the average turnover rate for the aggregated […]

Emerging mobile phone software and social network systems like GyPSii are creating new ways for mobile folks to find their friends and leave their mark. GyPSii lets you record places and events from your daily life with text and photos from your mobile device, then ”geotag” that content so it appears on a digital map. […]

The state of Oklahoma is working to reframe itself as the ”state of creativity” with a significant public relations, project positioning, and on-line effort to make their point. The Oklahoma Creativity Project, launched last month, works to get the now-ascendant ”C” word to the front-of-mind of citizens, legislators, and business leaders both inside and outside […]

An interesting series on NPR explored the structure, purpose, and benefits of various forms of play among young children (more on Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills and Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control, including audio of the stories, available on-line). The premise is that structured playtime, and highly specialized toys, do less to develop […]

The Online Spin blog points us to this University of Iowa research project on consumer knowledge and satisfaction. According to their experiments, consumers are often happier with their choice when they know less about what it is they bought. Says lead researcher Dhananjay Nayakankuppam: ”We found that once people commit to buying or consuming something, […]

Computer software and servers have long been the (necessary) bane of the nonprofit arts. If you could afford the equipment and software, you couldn’t afford to keep it current. Since not everyone used the network server for their updates, finding the current version of any file was an exercise in ”who had it last.” And […]

Mark Hager and The Nonprofit Quarterly launch a somber but essential conversation in his article/case study ”The Ultimate Question,” exploring when nonprofits might help their cause most effectively by shutting down and getting out of the way. The article tells the story of Metro Arts and Film, a nonprofit struck with a sudden funding crises […]

The United Kingdom’s Design Counsel offers a handy primer by Jeff Kindleysides on the emerging challenges of retail space design. If you simply replace the words ”retail” and ”stores” with ”cultural facilities,” you can cut right to the relevance for arts leaders. Like every other built environment serving a social purpose these days, retail is […]

Thanks, as ever, to information aesthetics for this link to an on-line visualization of collective thinking. The Human Brain Cloud describes itself as a ”massively multiplayer word association game” that asks its visitors to enter words they immediately associate with provided words, and then maps the clusters of responses in a dynamic and visual way. […]

Through a friend’s copy of Presentation Zen, I stumbled onto the strange beauty of Pecha Kucha, a seemingly arbitrary but undeniably compelling approach to PowerPoint presentations. Suggested and refined by architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein (and described here by Presentation Zen author Garr Reynolds), Pecha Kucha emerged as a way to share focused bursts […]