It looks like the U.S. Postal Service has found a way to downplay the long wait at post offices nationwide: get rid of the clocks. The Associated Press story (published here in the Houston Chronicle) reports that clocks have been removed from some 37,000 post offices as part of a “retail standardization program” launched last […]

If you need any further evidence that the distinction between nonprofit, for-profit, and informal/community arts isn’t a particularly relevant distinction, a quick look at this report out of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs should do the trick. The report by Ann Markusen et al, Crossover: How Artists Build Careers across Commercial, […]

As web sites, media options, leisure choices, and other clutter around us grows exponentially, one of the challenges of life is finding something worth paying attention to. Sure, you have Google and the like when you know what you’re looking for. You even have Amazon and other collaborative filtering systems to observe your purchase patterns […]

The Chicago Tribune explores the potential and pitfalls of variable pricing in the arts — charging different amounts for comparable seats, based on individual demand. The practice, which has long been the standard in airline ticketing and high-demand entertainment, is slowly entering the nonprofit cultural world, especially in Chicago: For the last three years or […]

The 501(c)3 nonprofit corporate form is a mainstay of the arts and culture world. It’s not overly complex in its basics (a governing board of three or more, organized for charitable purposes, operating toward those purposes, and not distributing benefits of operations to any of the governing parties). We tend to make the form more […]

There’s something safe and detached about very large statistics. The 29,569 gun-related deaths in the U.S. in 2004, for example. The 2.3 million Americans incarcerated in 2005. The 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags used in the U.S. every hour. But there’s nothing like a creative visual to bring the scale of those numbers into […]

I was pleased to get a new comment today from Matthew Kwatinetz, Producing Artistic Director of the Capitol Hill Arts Center in Seattle, which had been the subject of a weblog post way back in June. My original post was on CHAC’s decision to discontinue its traditional theater season, which was no longer working as […]

Managers of all sorts of social enterprise (nonprofit, public, commercial, coop, whatever) often find themselves stuck between the laws of economics and the goals of social good. Economic theory explores the mechanics of value creation and value transfer among individuals and throughout social systems. As such, it certainly should inform our strategies and tactics in […]

There’s a well-worn legend about the NASA space pen. Costing a million dollars to design, the pen was intended to solve the problem of writing in the no-gravity vacuum of space. The legend tells how the Soviets solved the same problem by using a pencil. And even though the legend isn’t true, it’s such a […]

As another presidential election rolls into gear, it will be instructional and fascinating to watch how each campaign makes use of social networking systems on the web. In fact, if you’re watching correctly, a major national election can offer a practical course on community engagement — exposing the best guesses of experts on how to […]