Given the uncertainty of the future of leisure time and disposable income for your audience, how do prepare your organization and your strategy? At the recent convening at The Getty Center on leisure time and culture, the participants dived into that very problem through a scenario exercise prepared by our facilitator, Steven J. Tepper. Scenario […]

I’ll be blogging more about the recent ”leisure trends” roundtable at the Getty Center this week, but wanted to take a break to flag a new report on special event fundraising from Charity Navigator. The analysis (also reported here in the Wisconsin State Journal, with the ”local” angle) suggests that special events, on average, are […]

”Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” –Albert Einstein. During the Getty Center convening on leisure time and culture discussed in my last two posts, one theme kept emerging (at least […]

Any dive into the data of leisure time leads to a strange and contradictory place. Extracting just a few of the factoids from the recent Getty convening background paper (noted and linked in my previous post): The percentage of U.S. commuters using private vehicles in 2005: 88 The percentage of these commuters driving alone: 90 […]

Do you have more or less leisure time than a decade ago? Do you have more or less than your parents did, or their parents? And regardless of the scope and scale, do you scan, filter, select, participate in, and evaluate your leisure activities differently than you once did? Finally, how do you think your […]

The last week of classes here at UW-Madison and my various other activities have left my weblog postless for a few days. Sorry about that. I’ll have more time and more fodder following my trip this week to the Getty in Los Angeles, for a roundtable conversation on the arts. The session (fire notwithstanding) will […]

A circuitous route (Neill Roan’s blog to Kevin Daoust to Steve Rubel to Forrester Research’s weblog) led me to Forrester’s recent report on ”Social Technographics.” The report explores and categorizes the behavior of individuals on-line, focusing on how they use social technologies (such as weblogs, feeds, tags, social network sites, etc.). The report, itself, comes […]

Web-watcher Donna Bogatin challenges a basic assumption of social networks on the web, and sites that celebrate the rise of the active user. She suggests that while media mavens are heralding the new world of user-generated content and a new democracy in public expression, statistics show that most of the world is still just watching. […]

I’m not posting early this week due to a crazed schedule. Take the opportunity to write you’re own post in the comments field!

Philanthropy and social sector specialist Peter Frumkin offers a useful series of posts on the concept of ”scale” in the nonprofit world. The impulse to increase scale — in organization size, in constituents served, in geography reached, and so on — is pervasive throughout the nonprofit system. But few organizations or funders seem to understand […]