Fractured Atlas Blog

Sorry New Jersey Artists: An Unhealthy Trend

2012-05-21T22:12:08Z

by Emily Gray

For over two years we’ve followed and reported on the progress of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “health reform” or “ObamaCare”) as it moved from just-passed legislation to (near) full-on implementation. There have been bumps along the way and a lot of logistics remain unsettled, but as we draw closer to 2014 the final pieces of the law are coming into place and major changes are in the works.

Health reform may not solve all of the myriad insurance-related challenges that artists face, but it represents real progress on a number of fronts. Notably, its most modest legislative achievement – the creation of state-run insurance exchanges to provide centralized, trustworthy information about plan options – will have perhaps the greatest impact on artists and other self-employed workers. This should be cause for celebration in the arts community.

In most states, anyway. Earlier this month New Jersey’s Chris Christie became the second governor – after New Mexico’s Susana Martinez – to veto legislation to create an online insurance exchange, calling it “premature” given that the Supreme Court is still deliberating the constitutionality of various aspects of the law.

True, the Court will not reach a decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act until this summer. But to postpone the creation of government-regulated online insurance marketplaces, designed with the needs of individuals and small businesses at heart, is to favor partisan point-scoring over the financial and physical well-being of one’s constituents.

The current insurance marketplace is opaque and tortuous to navigate. It is shockingly easy to purchase an insurance policy that is more expensive than warranted, or that excludes important coverages. Yes, there are ways to educate and protect oneself, but insurance is complicated, expensive, and very personal. Unless you have capable help that you trust to keep your best interests at heart, you’re at risk.

The exchanges provide one-stop shopping for all available plans—including government-run and private options—and the ability to compare plans side-by-side, including benefits, networks, and price. Consolidated offerings and standardized language empower consumers to make the best choices possible. Increased transparency and simplified shopping increase competition and drive premiums down. The result? Fewer uninsured individuals and more small businesses able to provide coverage for their employees, all at minimal cost to the state.

States with functioning health insurance exchanges will attract the eager, engaged, creative individuals who drive economic growth and improve our quality of life. There are enough barriers to entrepreneurial risk-taking: access to benefits should no longer be one.

Rather than stubbornly standing in the path of progress, our elected officials should follow the lead of these creative entrepreneurs and lay something on the line. This kind of grandstanding may go over big with Fox News, but allowing the health insurance marketplace to remain dangerous and opaque, while offering nothing resembling an alternative solution, is cowardice, not conviction.

It Gets Better: NYC Dance Community Edition

2012-05-21T13:56:18Z

by tim.cynova

What do President Obama, Tim Gunn, Sarah Silverman, the employees of Facebook and the New York City dance community have in common? As of June 5 they’ll all have filmed It Gets Better videos offering hope to LGBT youth.

On Tuesday, June 5, join friends and colleagues in recording messages of encouragement and inspiration for a special It Gets Better video from the NYC dance community. (Video will air the week of June 25.)

The event takes place at the Gibney Dance Center and is free and open to any member of the dance community. Please RSVP here for either the 8-10AM or 12-2PM time slot.

Take part in this epic gathering — record your video, enjoy the refreshments, and catch up with your cool dance colleagues before summer is in full swing.

Event and video production assistance provided by #SKYNOVA, Dance/NYC, Edwards & Skybetter | Change Agency, Fractured Atlas, Gibney Dance Center, JenEd Productions, and Jordan Isadore.

Fiscal Sponsorship Information session in New York City

2012-04-20T14:11:38Z

by diannedebicella

We’ve been on the road a ton lately, but the fiscal sponsorship staff is sticking close to home in June and we want to meet you. We’re hosting the fiscal sponsorship information session on June 13th in New York City at Wix Lounge. You will not only get the chance to see our friendly faces in person, but we’ll have snacks, drinks, and an insane amount of information on how you can connect to your audiences and raise money for your creative projects.

Aside from the yummy snacks and complimentary beer and wine, we’ll give a brief overview of the fiscal sponsorship program, talk about how to connect to and raise money from individuals, how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign (including information on Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and RocketHub), and briefly talk about grants. Plus, there will be time for chatting with us and each other!

If you’re currently sponsored by Fractured Atlas, interested in joining our program, raising funds for a creative project, or just want to say hi, this event is for you!

Wix Lounge has generously donated their space to Fractured Atlas for the event. Here are some details.

When: June 13, 2012 from 6- 8:00pm

Where: Wix Lounge
10 West 18th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011

RSVP: http://fiscalsponsorshipinfosessionnyc.eventbrite.com
Please use the above link to RSVP, it’s required and space is limited.

Wix Lounge is a great space. It’s located steps from Union Square, and is a completely free co-working and event space for creative professionals. You can grab your laptop, pop into the Lounge and enjoy a productive workday, great networking opportunities, and amazing events. Active since 2010, the Wix Lounge is run by Wix.com, a free website publishing platform providing user friendly tools for building beautiful, easy-to-make desktop, mobile, and Facebook sites. The Wix Lounge provides free support to Wix.com users, giving them help and advice for making the ideal website.

Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem

2012-05-09T13:55:44Z

by Ian David Moss

Art Cars Attack, photo by M Glasgow

“I feel like whenever I talk to artists these days, I should be apologizing,” says Kevin Stolarick, Research Director for the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. To most in the arts community, Stolarick is better known as Richard Florida’s longtime right-hand man and research collaborator on his bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Stolarick, who first met Florida just after the academic had cashed the first check for the advance from Basic Books, proceeds to recount how the book’s success led to an explosion of interest from mayors all around the country wanting to redefine their cities as welcoming meccas for Florida’s new Starbucks-drinking, jeans-wearing idea people. Unfortunately, the mayors’ collective interpretation of the lessons from Florida’s book boiled down to, “all we need is to get us some gays and artists and a bike path or two, and our problems will be solved! The problem,” Stolarick tells us, a decade after The Rise of the Creative Class’s publication, “is that it’s a trap.”

This scene is unfolding in a basement auditorium in lower Manhattan, the site of a panel and presentation hosted by the Municipal Art Society of New York to give audiences the first public preview of the ArtPlace vibrancy indicators. ArtPlace, as many readers know, is a private-sector partnership among nearly a dozen leading foundations to support “creative placemaking,” a term invented by officials at the National Endowment for the Arts. Spearheaded by leadership from the NEA, the creation of ArtPlace is perhaps this Endowment’s, and by extension the Obama administration’s, signature achievement in the arts—despite the fact that it doesn’t distribute a cent of government money.

Stolarick’s presence at the event was appropriate, for in many ways it was The Rise of the Creative Class that made the current creative placemaking movement possible. For a time it was the kind of book that smart people buy for all of the other smart people they know – a genuine ideavirus. Florida, more than anyone else, was responsible for conflating creativity, innovation, and artistry in the popular imagination, and among the measures that he and Stolarick developed for the book was a “Bohemian index” associating the concentration of artists in a given metropolitan area with population and employment growth. Though the empirical claims in the book turned out to be built on shaky foundations, they were intuitive (and well-argued) enough that municipal leaders started taking notice. In fact, Carol Coletta, the current director of ArtPlace, was one of the first people to invite Florida to help put his ideas into practice in a real city context as co-organizer of 2003’s Memphis Manifesto Summit. Florida, Stolarick, and their associates became the first widely acknowledged spokespeople for the idea that a vibrant set of opportunities and amenities for creative expression could lead to regional economic prosperity.

But Florida wasn’t the only one drawing public attention to the economic power of the arts over the previous decade. Separately, the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania has been studying the relationship between concentrations of cultural resources and various social and economic outcomes since 1994. As then-Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, Joan Shigekawa commissioned a groundbreaking collaboration between SIAP and The Reinvestment Fund to study the dynamics of culture and urban revitalization, work whose influence can be seen clearly in much of the policy that Shigekawa has since helped develop as Senior Deputy Chairman of the NEA.

SIAP, which is led by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, cites The Rise of the Creative Class frequently in its publications dating from that period, usually to position its approach in opposition to Florida’s. In fact, in 2008 SIAP published one of the most hilariously brutal program evaluations I’ve ever read, following the attempts of Florida’s Creative Class Group (CCG) to turn around three Knight Foundation communities by inspiring volunteer “catalysts” to drive toward the “4 T’s” of economic development (technology, talent, tolerance, and territorial assets). In that evaluation, Stern and Seifert offer a single overarching criticism: CCG forgot about its outcomes. Much like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes, the project team had a clear idea of what it was putting in to the process and what it hoped to get out of it, but a much vaguer sense of how they were going to get from Phase 1 to Phase 3.

South Park's Underpants Gnomes, image courtesy Wikipedia

Which brings me to my central point: despite all of the attention paid to this issue in the past year and a half, despite all of the new money that has been committed to the cause, creative placemaking still has an outcomes problem. As a field, we have not yet learned the lessons of the Underpants Gnomes. And until we do, I’m worried that we risk repeating Stolarick’s apology to practitioners a decade hence.

Leaving the dots unconnected

“When times were good,” Kevin Stolarick explains at the ArtPlace vibrancy indicators convening, it was easy for city councils, funders, and others to buy into the ideas in Florida’s book on the strength of his celebrity and qualitative arguments. But now that cities are facing more economic pressure, Stolarick continues, “they’re saying, ‘we need proof – and that’s going to take more than Richard Florida’s next book.’”

“Proof” is a word that seems to give creative placemakers hives these days. Less than two weeks prior to the ArtPlace event, I had participated in a webinar given by the NEA to introduce its Our Town Community Indicators Study. Our Town is the Endowment’s public-sector counterpart to ArtPlace – likewise the brainchild of Rocco Landesman, it granted some $6.6 million to communities for creative placemaking projects across the country in its inaugural round last year. The Community Indicators Study is a multiyear data collection effort whose chief purpose is to “advance public understanding of how creative placemaking strategies can strengthen communities.” Yet when, prompted by researchers who were listening in on the call, the NEA’s Chief of Staff, Jamie Bennett, asked the Deputy Director of NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis about causation vs. correlation, this is the exchange that resulted:

Bennett: …Are you going to in some way be able through this project to prove [for example] that arts had a direct impact in causing the crime rate to go down?

Shewfelt: A lot of the language I’ve used today has been very carefully chosen to avoid suggesting that we are trying to design a way to specifically address the causal relationship between creative placemaking and the outcomes we’re interested in.

As a matter of fact, the NEA has chosen to forgo a traditional evaluation of the Our Town grant program in favor of developing the aforementioned indicator system. The project will no doubt result in a lot of great data, but essentially no mechanism for connecting the Endowment’s investments in Our Town projects to the indicators one sees. A project could be entirely successful on its own terms but fail to move the needle in a meaningful way in its city or neighborhood. Or it could be caught up in a wave of transformation sweeping the entire community, and wrongly attribute that wave to its own efforts. There’s simply no way for us to tell. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we can’t accomplish the goal of “advancing understanding of how creative placemaking strategies can strengthen communities” without digging more deeply into the causal relationships that the NEA would prefer to avoid.

The vibrancy indicators that were the subject of the ArtPlace convening face a similar quandary. The purpose of the indicators is to help ArtPlace “understand the impact of [its] investments.” And what is that desired impact? During a webinar delivered to prospective applicants last fall, Coletta declared that “with ArtPlace, we aim to do nothing less than transform economic development in America…to awaken leaders who care about the future of their communities to the fact that they’re sitting on a pile of assets that can help them achieve their ambitions…and that asset is art.”

ArtPlace Theory of Change

ArtPlace’s investments all have a singular focus on “vibrancy,” a concept defined in its guidelines as “attracting people, activities and value to a place and increasing the desire and the economic opportunity to thrive in a place.” While that was as specific as things got during ArtPlace’s first two rounds of grantmaking, the indicators project, which examines factors as diverse as cell phone use, population density, and home values, will go a long way toward concretizing ArtPlace’s primary lever of community transformation. Even so, ArtPlace doesn’t seem any more eager than the NEA to connect the activities of its grant recipients to the broader vibrancy indicators directly. Though the projects themselves are supposed to have a “transformative” impact on vibrancy, ArtPlace isn’t requiring its grantees to collect any data on how that impact is achieved. Furthermore, ArtPlace’s guidelines state clearly that the consortium has no plans to invest in research on creative placemaking beyond the vibrancy indicators themselves, despite its advocacy goals and a desire to “share the lessons [grantees] are learning to other communities across the U.S.”

To be clear, I don’t mean to question the value of research of the type ArtPlace and Our Town are leading. Efforts such as these, Fractured Atlas’s Archipelago data aggregation and visualization platform, Americans for the Arts’s National and Local Arts Index, Western States Arts Federation’s Creative Vitality Index, and others help to draw a clear picture of a community’s overall cultural and creative health and can serve as an essential tool within a broader research portfolio. But in order for those tools to really come alive in a grantmaking context, they have to be grounded in a clear and rigorous conceptual frame for the how the specific funded activities are going to make a difference, and then integrated into the actual process for selecting grant recipients. And that’s the part still missing from the vast majority of these efforts. In an upcoming article for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus (who co-authored the original Creative Placemaking white paper for the NEA with her mentor, Ann Markusen) writes, “it’s probably unreasonable to expect that a modest, one-year Our Town grant will move the needle, at least quickly….Because the geographic scale, time horizons, and desired outcomes vary across creative placemaking efforts, one-size-fits-all indicator systems may prove inappropriate.”

Without a clear and detailed theory of how and why creative placemaking is effective, policy and philanthropy to support creative placemaking is hobbled. Attempting to predict and judge impact based on indicator systems alone carries with it at least four problems:

It doesn’t give a clear road map for project selection that will identify investments most likely to make a difference. Without previous research demonstrating causal interactions between grants given and differences made, it’s hard to know what effect a new grant will have – much less how to compare the potential effects of hundreds or (in ArtPlace’s case) thousands of competing investment opportunities.
It doesn’t give us the tools to go back and analyze why certain projects did and didn’t work. Maybe a public artwork succeeds in drawing people to a neighborhood, but real estate values stay stagnant. Maybe development along a transit corridor was executed on schedule, but ridership is lower than expected. Broad, sector-level indicators will only tell us that the project didn’t work – not why.
It doesn’t acknowledge the complex nature of economic ecosystems and the indirect role that arts projects play in them. Many economists agree that talented, highly educational individuals are key to community prosperity. But numerous considerations likely play into their decision to (re)locate in a particular place. When are the arts truly catalytic for a community, and when are they merely icing on the cake? Indicator systems would have no way of telling us on their own.
It gives us few tools to understand how to pursue arts-led economic development while avoiding the thorny problems of gentrification. Any thinking around policy interventions must acknowledge the possibility of negative impacts as well as positive ones. In the case of creative placemaking, an attendant worry is that longtime residents of transformed neighborhoods won’t have asked for the change, and may be adversely affected by it. To date, there is little shared understanding of how creative placemaking projects that benefit all community residents are distinguished from those that simply replace poorer residents with wealthier ones.

In her Reader article, Nicodemus writes that

The answer to the question “What is creative placemaking, really?” is that funders and practitioners are making it up in real time. We’ve entered an exciting period of experimentation, which makes sharing information absolutely critical.

In the interest of sharing information, then, I will report out below on some lessons I’ve learned from my own research on the topic over the past five years, as well as from a collaboration with ArtsWave, a funder supporting vibrancy through the arts in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region.

Toward a unified theory of creative placemaking: Filling in the blanks

The major deficiency of the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan was that they attempted to connect their activity (stealing underpants) with their intended impact (profit), without really considering the steps in between. To take an extreme example, if I start an organization called “Artists for World Peace” (there is such an organization, by the way), get some artists together to stand in solidarity, and put on a show, it would be unrealistic of me to expect world peace as the next logical result.

Yet most studies of the connection between the arts and economic development have attempted to measure the direct relationship between arts activities (whether single or in the aggregate) and economic outcomes. For example, the Social Impact of the Arts Project examined the correlation between cultural assets and poverty decline in Philadelphia, and a groundbreaking study by Steve Sheppard compared employment levels and real estate values in North Adams, MA before and after the opening of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. These research efforts have done much to shape our collective understanding of urban revitalization through the arts. But they share in common an unfortunate tendency to gloss over the details of exactly how creative activities are responsible for making neighborhoods and communities more attractive, and therefore, more valuable. This gap is especially problematic when one tries to apply the lessons of these studies to a policy or grantmaking context, where the details of how projects are implemented can make all the difference in whether a particular intervention is successful or not.

When I was in graduate school, before I came into contact with any of the research above, I created a simple model of arts-led gentrification to illustrate the specific case of a neighborhood lent a young, “hip” reputation by newly relocated artists. This model is different from others I’ve seen in a few ways. First, it casts neighborhood development as an iterative process, starting with tourism on the local level among artists. In other words, the people who are going to be checking out the happenings in a struggling outpost of the city are not, by and large, yuppies – they are other artists who are colleagues of the ones living in that neighborhood. Second, it emphasizes the role of bars and restaurants as attractors for other neighborhood visitors (including yuppies), whose viability is only made possible by the modest foot traffic generated by arts activities. And finally, it places at the beginning of the process not just arts activities, but specific kinds of arts activities: visible, storefront spaces like galleries and performance venues that signal the presence of art and draw visitors to a particular location.

Three years later, some of the thinking reflected above found its way into my grantmaking strategy work with ArtsWave, an local arts agency based in Cincinnati, OH. First, some background: in late 2008, ArtsWave had commissioned a research initiative designed to develop an inclusive public conversation about the arts in the region. Based on hundreds of conversations, interviews, and focus groups with area residents, two key “ripple effect” benefits emerged as especially valued by citizens:

that the arts create a vibrant, thriving economy: neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists are attracted to the area, etc…and
that the arts create a more connected community: diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better.

To its immense credit, ArtsWave didn’t just sit on these results and continue in the status quo. Instead, the 83-year-old united arts fund underwent a total transformation, taking on a new name and organizational identity, and most importantly, adopting these two themes as the new goals for its grantmaking.

My task, starting in January 2011, was to assist ArtsWave in creating a new framework for funding arts & culture activities based upon the ability of organizations to create vibrancy and connect people in the region. With the help of a volunteer task force consisting of ArtsWave board members, staff, community leaders, and grantee organizations, we worked backwards from the idea of “vibrancy” and ended up with an extraordinarily complex theory of change. Here’s the part that specifically deals with cultural clusters and neighborhood economic development:

Excerpt from ArtsWave theory of change: cultural clusters

Some elements of this model will certainly look familiar, though with some new wrinkles added: evening and weekend hours for storefronts, for example, as well as decreased crime and improved physical spaces (in general, not just arts spaces). ArtsWave, however, extended the concept to apply to regional economic development as well:

Excerpt from ArtsWave theory of change: regional development

Note here that the principal lever for the regional development model is that the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region is “differentiated” through the arts. That is to say, it attracts people from outside of the region because it gains a (deserved) reputation for being a more interesting place to be than its peer cities. And what helps differentiate Cincinnati is something we call “extraordinary cultural experiences.” We attach a very specific definition to “extraordinary,” focusing on its literal meaning of “out of the ordinary.” For ArtsWave’s purposes, experiences are extraordinary if they are associated with one of the following:

Events or productions with a national or international profile
Events or productions that feature something uniquely special about the region
Events or productions that feature innovative programming or presentation

Not only do experiences meeting the above criteria help to differentiate the Greater Cincinnati region in the eyes of tourists or prospective residents, they also contribute directly to ArtsWave’s notion of “vibrancy” (the green arrow in the diagram).

What this approach does is explicitly connect the activities of grantees to the broader community change that ArtsWave hopes to create. A key innovation that came out of this process was the distinction between “Sector Outcomes” (in blue) and “Grantee Outcomes” (in purple). We defined grantee outcomes as the farthest point out in the model to which individual organizations could reasonably be held accountable—and those outcomes feed back into the evaluation and selection process at the grant application stage. All other outcomes, the sector outcomes, are a reflection on ArtsWave’s overall strategy, rather than on any one particular investment. This allows us to “aggregate” impact from the level of the individual project to the level of the broader context.

The beauty of designing a model like this is that it allows each assumption embedded in each link on the causal chain to be tested, if necessary. Of course, it would be impractical to do so for every investment a grantmaker might make. But that isn’t necessary. In order to provide the kind of evidence that mayors and other officials are looking for, you only need a few examples to demonstrate replicability. But we have to be sure that those examples really do show the effects of intentional creative placemaking strategy, rather than just a lucky coincidence.

Where We Go From Here

Despite the challenges I discuss in the first part of this article, I’m heartened to see creative placemaking funders taking some positive steps toward a more rigorous theoretical foundation for their work. In particular, ArtPlace is beginning to move in this direction with a list of ten signals grantees can use to judge whether their projects are making a difference. The challenge will be to unpack those relationships with the same rigor as is currently applied to collecting data.

Meanwhile, we would love feedback on the models we have created to describe economic development through the arts. While we are hopeful they can help to move the conversation towards a deeper consideration of the complex mechanisms involved in creating place-based vibrancy, we readily acknowledge that they aren’t perfect. Do they accurately reflect creative placemaking goals and processes? Which aspects of the model are best backed up by existing research and which are shakiest? Which seem intuitively right but have not been studied in depth? What are we leaving out?

If you have comments, questions, or resources to offer, please leave a comment here or get in touch at ian.moss@fracturedatlas.org. And in the meantime, Fractured Atlas will be eagerly researching how emerging evaluation methods in other sectors, such as outcome mapping, most significant change technique, and complexity science, can potentially be applied to the arts.

Take Our 2012 Member Survey, Win $250 to Amazon!

2012-05-04T19:00:21Z

by Adam Natale

It’s that time of year again! You know, the one where we bribe you to tell us how we’re doing. That’s right, it’s the 2012 Fractured Atlas Member Survey!

This year, we’re pleased to offer one lucky survey-taker a $250 gift certificate to Amazon.com! Please note, only current Fractured Atlas members are eligible to take the survey and win the prize.

Just give us 5 minutes of your time — let us know what we do well, what we could do better, and what changes we should make as we move ahead. As a membership organization, we really value all of your feedback and insights.

Click here to take the survey now!

Gary Shapiro Does Not Approve of Your Sloth

2012-05-03T20:55:09Z

by Emily Gray

Fractured Atlas has campaigned tirelessly to make benefits like health insurance available to artists and other creative entrepreneurs. So we couldn’t help but notice this blog post by Gary Shapiro, President of the Consumer Electronics Association, attacking House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi for promoting the idea that artists should have access to affordable health insurance.

The article trots out all the tired old clichés about how the poor and disenfranchised just need to be ignored so they can learn the value of a hard day’s work. But Shapiro’s most head-scratching argument is when he condemns “ObamaCare” for “allowing anyone to quit their job and pursue their passion.”

Here’s the full quote from Pelosi:

You want to be a photographer or a writer or a musician, whatever - an artist, you want to be self-employed, if you want to start a business, you want to change jobs, you no longer are prohibited from doing that because you can’t have access to health care…

To Shapiro, this proves that “this view [that able-bodied individuals should not be expected to work and should instead be allowed to feed from the public trough] has infected our leadership at the highest level.” In other words, artists and creative entrepreneurs are lazy and would rather leach off the government than get a real job.

This is so grossly misguided that it’s hard to know where to begin. Not only has Shapiro apparently never met an actual working artist, but he completely ignores the enormous benefits that society derives from a thriving creative economy. (He also seems to have a rather poor understanding of the health reform law, which for the most part has nothing to do with government handouts.) When a creative individual leaves her safe if soul-crushing day job to pursue an entrepreneurial passion, it’s not lazy. It’s courageous and quintessentially American.

Our society erects plenty of legitimate (if harsh) barriers to pursuing a career in the arts or starting a new creative business. That historical quirks of our dysfunctional health insurance system make it harder still is not just adding insult to injury. It impoverishes us all by stymieing untold creative potential when our economy needs it most.

We applaud Pelosi’s leadership, not just for championing the under-served and the under-privileged, but for recognizing that America prospers when creativity thrives.

Fiscal Sponsorship and Fundraising Webinars

2012-05-01T21:12:28Z

by diannedebicella

Fractured Atlas is offering four different fiscal sponsorship and fundraising sessions by webinar in May. If you’ve never participated in a webinar before, there’s no need to worry - it’s quite easy. All you need is access to the internet.

Orientation for New Fiscally Sponsored Projects
This webinar is for new projects who have recently been accepted into the Fractured Atlas fiscal sponsorship program and are ready to get their feet wet. The webinar will provide a tour of the online tools and resources, tips for starting your fundraising, and an overview of program policies.

When: Tuesday, May 8th, 2012, 7:30 - 8:30pm EST

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to RSVP.

Introduction to Fundraising: Individual Donors and Online Campaigns Webinar
This webinar will focus on cultivating individual donors. We’ll talk about how to identify and engage donors, and how to keep them coming back! We’ll go over individual appeal letters, tools such as crowdfunding and online campaigns, and more. This webinar is for any fiscally sponsored project that is ready to learn basic steps to start and run an individual giving program.

When: Tuesday, May 15th, 2012, 7:30 - 8:30pm EST

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to RSVP.

Copyright for Artists webinar
With the recent increase in copyright issues and lawsuits, visual and performing artists need to be aware of copyright laws and the legal issues that may affect their practice and the presentation of their art work. This class will focus on copyright law, with a primer on some of the more pressing legal concerns for artists today, such as the distinction between ideas and expression, the use of appropriated images and text, as well as fair use. The webinar will refer to legal cases in order to illustrate key concepts. This webinar is co-hosted by Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and is $35 for members and $45 for non-members. It is the third in a four part series of webinars co-hosted by VLA.

When: Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012, 6:00-7:30pm EST

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to register.

Proposals and Grants for Fiscally Sponsored Projects
This webinar is focused on best practices when applying for a grant. We’ll provide an overview of different types of institutional support, how to find funders, what is needed in a proposal, and more. This webinar is for any fiscally sponsored project that has met the Fractured Atlas eligibility requirement to apply for grants.

When: Tuesday, May 29th, 2012, 7:30 - 8:30pm EST

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to RSVP.

Organs of State: Internet Performance and Beyond

2012-04-30T20:05:29Z

by Sarah McLellan

Organs of State is a performance company that makes big ideas tangible and human, and shares them with its audience by staging whole, performative, participatory events. Although at the core it is performance arts, they’re building a home for experimenting artists and audiences of all stripes.

We spoke with artistic director Guy Yedwab about how Organs of State creates their cutting-edge work, and how Fractured Atlas has figured into their artistic process.

What is your company’s “origin story?”
Organs started in 2009 as a loose band of theatermakers around an initial project based on the short stories of Franz Kafka - all of them. We had members from a variety of different training methods and parts of the world, and we decided that we wanted to create a home for people who wanted to dive into these ideas, regardless of their background as an artist or an audience member.

Every year, we have a “new” origin story because we get together twice a year to discuss the mission, the company, and the work, and we refine who we are and what we do based on the experiences of the previous six months.

Does your company have a “typical” way of creating performances? In other words, could you tell me about your artistic process?
The artistic process varies by who is helming a particular piece of work – we focus on original work, and so we often come up with coming up with original processes for developing the work. Most of the time, we’re devising the original work as a company We start with a question that we’re interested in tackling, and some source texts to research from, and that’s where we start a devising process from. We create small moments of work based on small assignments and exercises, and we start to build up a vocabulary of performance moments that we can draw from. Once we have a store of these moments, we can start to weave them together as a single event.

In parallel, we’re also developing the aspects around the production. When we say we strive for “whole” events, what we means is that we’re working for events where

Except when it doesn’t happen like that. After all, it’s an experiment!

Your Fractured Atlas profile lists you as “Theatre,” but I see a lot of multi-arts language on your website. Would you call yourselves a theatre company? Why/why not?
The “theatre” tag is a little old: I’d say we see ourselves as more of a performance company. When we started in 2009, we just did theater, but since then our members and our audience have shown a real hunger for experimenting with the performative side of a number of different disciplines: video/media, stage combat, fine arts, and (most recently) internet performance. We still focus on what’s performative about these media - how we can use these things in an active way to tell a story, drive conversation about the big ideas, and create whole events that people can get wrapped up in.

Internet performance – can you tell me a bit more about that?
Well, we’re still figuring that out, as we’re still in our first internet performance venture. For this project, we’re creating lives of people on the internet. We create social media lives, they have social media accounts, and as they’re experiencing the events of the project they’re responding it in real time. Our director has a concept of the trails that emerge on the internet, but it also turns into a kind of treasure map – a party leads to Facebook leads to YouTube leads to a Wikipedia article leads back to Facebook.

I see that you are currently in your “Eulogy Season.” Where did this idea come from - forming a season around the concept of Eulogies? Do you think you will continue to center your seasons around a theme in the future?
There’s a number of reasons that the themed season came about, all sort of converging at the same time. From a practical side, we were looking for a way to tighten up our voice as a company - since we make work of so many different kinds and in different ways, it can be hard to get a unified sense of who we are and what we do, so the overarching voice that is our company can be heard. It also gives us a direction, North Star to plot our course by as we make decisions. And artistically, it knits the stories together, to make them reflective of a bigger idea, something that our loyal Citizens can track as they follow from show to show.

The Eulogy was on my mind because 2011 started with the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, and there was a slow march of eulogies and remembrances and retrospective, so it was on my mind: Why do we do tell these stories, who gets to tell thm, what makes a “good” or “helpful” eulogy, etc.

I think we’ve gotten a good response, so we’ll be doing more work around themes. After our last Eulogy piece in April, Américana Passover, we’ll be already at work on development of the 2012 season, “What the State Provides,” revisiting the social contract, why we have governments, what we can or can’t expect from it, etc. Unless something weird happens, I think that’s the big question behind this upcoming election:

I hear that you’ve been making good use of our newly revamped NYC Performing Arts Spaces. Could you tell me about how Spaces has been helpful to you?
We’ve found some great spaces during the last three years of searching for space with NYC Performing Art Spaces. Our approach to finding space is that we’re not just looking for a theater with a certain amount of space, we’re looking for a space that creates the world of our work; so one show had us searching for a tight loft space, another has us looking for a clean event space to hold a memorial service in. Sometimes it’s a theater, and sometimes it’s not.

NYC Performing Arts Spaces helps us quickly come up with a pretty long shortlist of spaces to visit, so we can be really choosy about the space we’re taking, so that it’s more than just a space, it’s part of our whole, performative event.

The first time I produced anything outside a university, I had a cast of 18 or so and a movement focus, so when we started looking for rehearsal spaces, we realized we couldn’t have just any rehearsal space - we needed something 20 by 20, or larger. I was surprised when I went to the site how easy it was to find that exact size listed. When we looked for performance venues, we knew what we didn’t want a proscenium, so we started looking for 99 seat theatres listed as flexible, but quickly learned that visually and aesthetically there’s a lot of difference. We visited a lot of spaces and discovered the Paradise Factory. What really stuck out about the Paradise Factory was it wasn’t just a black box; this space had exposed brick walls and windows and it created a lot of environment and helped us create the show. We try to find a space that accomplishes part of the work we’re doing.

Since NYC Performing Arts Spaces has been updated, I found that the user interface was nicer and I appreciate the time Fractured Atlas is taking to make things look nice and clean. The move towards making bookings on the actual website is great. One of the complications with making work is always people’s availability – our actors get their work schedule a week in advance, so we can’t book rehearsal space until a week in advance. It takes up a lot of my time to get everyone’s schedule, then to start calling rehearsal spaces – it can be really time consuming. Before online booking, I was doing a lot of clicking and phone calls, and now I can spend a lot less time on that and more time producing. It’s also become a lot clearer when venues are out of business, because that happens!

How has your membership with Fractured Atlas helped you?
Even more than I expected when I first signed up! Services we use include:

- Fiscal Sponsorship allows us to meet between 20-50% of our shows’ budgets, particularly with the integration with IndieGoGo that helps us raise a broad base of small donations

- We simply can’t do business with theaters without the General Liability insurance, and the Volunteer Accident insurance helped us keep a sense of safety when our last show included 23 actors fighting with swords…

- Around 1/2 of our shows have been in space we’ve found through NYCPaSpaces.org

- we use our discounted ZipCar account pretty regularly for getting our stuff where it needs to go.

- Fractured Atlas got us in touch with a special Chase banker that got us the checking, savings, and credit card accounts that our companies use.

What’s next for Organs of State?

We just wrapped up the second performance in our Eulogy series, In Memoriam, a piece that tries to grapple with how we tell a story about loss online. You can learn more about the project at it’s wiki ( http://inmemoriam.organsofstate.org ) which was the center staging point for all the information about the project.

After that, the “What the State Provides” season and… who knows what else!

Images from John Kurzynowski’s Hamlet at the Paradise Factory:

Fractured Atlas at the Create Denver Expo

2012-04-20T14:09:35Z

by diannedebicella

Fractured Atlas is offering a workshop called Fiscal Sponsorship + Crowdfunding = $$ for Creative Projects at the Create Denver Expo on Saturday, May 12th.

The session is designed for anyone who is interested in using fiscal sponsorship. We’ll explore the benefits and use of Fractured Atlas’s fiscal sponsorship program as a fundraising tool. There will be an overview of fiscal sponsorship, how to apply, how to use the tools within the program, and an introduction to fundraising. We’ll explore the benefits and tools of crowdfunding sites, such as IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, and RocketHub. Find out how to use crowdfunding as an effective fundraising tool. We will also explore how these resources can be used in conjunction with fiscal sponsorship.

Where: Colorado Convention Center
700 14th St
Denver, CO

If you’d like to attend these sessions, don’t forget to register for the Expo. Registration is $10 and gives you access to a number of activities. I hope to see you there!

It’s time for another focus group: back to DC!

2012-04-28T16:55:35Z

by Emily Gray

DC artists! If you missed the last focus group (and let me tell you, we had a swell time!) you have another chance to get in on the action! We have one more focus group scheduled for next Wednesday, May 2nd and once again there will be $50, snacks, and a chance to tell us your thoughts on health insurance. Interested? Click here for more information, or if you’re ready to commit contact Jillian at 202-333-0400 or artistfocusgroup@reingold.com to find out how to get involved.

Regional Dispatch: The Wharton Salon

2012-04-19T16:26:24Z

by Sarah McLellan

The next installment of our Regional Dispatch series comes from Western Massachusetts from Catherine Taylor-Williams, Fractured Atlas member and Producing Artistic Director of The Wharton Salon. Enjoy, and don’t forget to email Sarah McLellan if you would like to be featured in Regional Dispatch!

A theatrical love affair with a house in Western Massachusetts

“On a slope overlooking the dark waters and densely wooded shores of Laurel Lake we built a spacious and dignified house, to which we gave the name of my grandfather’s place, The Mount.” -Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Built on three acres of formal gardens, standing stark white on a hill that emerges down a gravel lane lined with ferns and trees overlooking Laurel Lake; or sometimes lit ghostly pale against a full moon; still other times basked in sunshine like an Italian villa, The Mount, like her mistress, American novelist Edith Wharton, is an enigmatic and formidable hostess.

As I child I grew up around 19^th century books, and yet I never ran into Wharton. I came to the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts in 2001 from Toronto, Canada, just before 9-11, to run away and join Shakespeare & Company. I can’t say I gave much thought to where I was going. I was working, and that was enough for me. S&Co was in residence at The Mount at that time, their home of 25 years began as a kind of theatre commune in 1978. There were legendary love affairs, quarrels, encounters with ghostly presences, people got together, split apart, babies were born, there were torch-lit parties in the woods, and Shakespeare was performed in the backyard of The Mount under the stars all summer long.

Inside The Mount the stories of its literary mistress, Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome) were performed as plays, in broad daylight, in an intimate drawing room overlooking rolling lawns. The audiences sat very close on two sides and the actors performed in the center. The slightest move, the slightest look, was momentous in such a small space. As a house manager that first summer, I held the door for the actors as they swept by in their Gilded Age costumes. The magic was happening even before they hit the stage. The house would transform them as they passed and together, actors and audience, we traveled back in time.

That was the last summer S&Co spent at The Mount. The board of the theatre company and a board formed to save the historic house were in the middle of a tense legal battle for possession of the property and its use. The company left for its own property down the street, and I continued on until 2007 as an actress and working in the press office. For some number of years S&Co occupied another Gilded Age house a few miles away, but the connection with Wharton was lost.

I left the Berkshires in September of 2007, I thought forever, after winning a coveted place as a Kennedy Center Arts Management fellow in Washington, and from there I went to New York City to work in development for the Atlantic Theater Company and to try my hand at producing as part of the Women’s Project producers lab. I loved the life and sparkle of the City, but I missed the mountains, the trees and bird song, I missed the actors at S&Co, and I missed The Mount. Besides, my three-room apartment in The Berkshires was soooo cheap, how could I let it go? My fiancé, Robert, and I went back to The Berkshires to be married, and my dog absolutely refused to go to a tiny sublet in New York City, so she stayed behind with my landlady. So a commuting relationship with the Berkshires continued for the next two years.

By 2008, The Mount was in financial trouble. By the end of the following year pretty much everyone was, but non-profits that had been carrying debt were even worse off. I sat in a coffee shop with the Executive Director of The Mount on one of my Berkshire weekends and pitched her the idea of resurrecting Edith Wharton’s stories as plays at the Mount under a new company, The Wharton Salon, realizing a long time dream for me of directing and producing. The Mount had no money, but that was not necessarily an impediment since I had just learned a few things about raising it. I was sure the audiences hadn’t forgotten about those magical years at The Mount. I received permission from the founders of Shakespeare & Company to use their Wharton scripts, and I began calling the actors who had the deepest connection with the work to see who would come back. Everyone was interested, “money be damned, and when could they start?”

Our first production in the summer of 2009 sold out in a few days. I made a sheepish call to the local paper of record that I had begged for a feature coming out the following day to say we had no tickets left and what should we do? This summer we will produce our fourth season, and the first year with plays in both August and November. The company has swelled to 30 associated artists. I have begun videotaping interviews, as some company members are 20-year veterans of performing the works of Wharton, about what they want to pass on to the next generation, the craft of performing without blackouts, and their relationship to Mrs. Wharton and her house.

I moved back to the Berkshires full time in 2010. I walk in Wharton’s ancestral woods on my way to rehearsals, I breathe fresh air, and through the Wharton Salon I celebrate the works of Edith Wharton, her contemporary writers, and her incredible house. My days are wrapped in literature, beauty, architecture and nature.

Edith Wharton kept a “Commonplace Book” where she kept her favorite quotations including long extracts from the Phaedrus. One that we say backstage before performances is Socrates Prayer, which I believe most exemplifies Wharton’s spirit: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods that haunt this place. Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and the inward be one.”

Catherine Taylor-Williams is an actor, director, producer, fundraiser, nature-lover, wife of artist and teacher Robert Serrell, and companion of a stubborn 15-year-old Italian greyhound. She happily lives in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts and hopes to be buried one day not far from The Mount and join it’s company of very artistic ghosts.

The Wharton Salon (Outdoors at The Mount) L-R Corinna May, Diane Prusha, Tod Randolph, Catherine Taylor-Williams, Jennie Burkhard Jadow, Karen Lee. Photo Credit: Kevin Sprague

Congratulations to Recently Approved Fiscally Sponsored Projects!

2012-04-20T14:09:04Z

by diannedebicella

In April our board approved 118 projects from 26 states. These projects applied for fiscal sponsorship in March. Check them out!

108

2011-2012 Theatrical Season

23 Skidoo

Abandoned Lighthouse Alzheimer’s Project

Adisa Baba

Anthem Theatre Company

ASSOCIATION FOR CIVIL RIGHTS STUDIES PRESENTS: ANONYMITY: The History of Straight, Incorporated, a feature length documentary about torture in juvenile detention and boot camps.

Austin McMahon & Santi Quintans

Bauhaus twenty-21: An Ongoing Legacy

Benjamin Wardell

BetterMediaWorks

Black Henna Productions Presents Twelfth Night

Bully

Careless Love: A Down Home Musical

Carner and Gregor

Cause in a Classroom

Cerebral Motion Productions

Clarinda Mac Low: Art, Performance and Ideas

Different Voice Opera Project

Distilled Theatre Company

Dreams For Dead Cats Productions

Earth Pearl Collective

Emergence Surgical Gifts Documentary Project

ethikos

For Boston

Fund Balance

Gates of Silence Recording

Hawaii Art Center Research

Hearts And Brains

Hip-Hop Theater Festival

Hot Wood Arts

Independent Theatre Alliance

Linda Bouchard, composer

Morris Chamber Music Projects

Music Beyond the Chamber

Nevada Repertory Dance Theater

North Bend

Oberon Theatre Ensemble

Olympic Theatre Productions

Opera MODO

Peace Pilot

People Powered Public Television

Perchance To Dream Theatre

Reclamation (working title)

Retreat Beyond the Boroughs: A Theatre Arts Cultivation Center

Robot Film Festival

Rockstar Materna

Roller Boogie: The Musical

Safe Gun

San Antonio Young Filmmakers Project

Scream Fire Theatre Ensemble

S-He

Sing Masters Workshop

Skate Yrself Clean

Solidarity in Saya

SpoonTree Productions

Stone Soup Theatre Project

Strange Sun Theater Company

Tanya Roberts, Soprano

The Broken Phoenix

The Collective SP and L initiatives

The Gold Fish

The Happiest Person In America

THE MARCH Civil Rights Opera Project

The Pacem Island Fund

The Queer Theater Company

The Sounding Balloon

The TREK Project

The Work of Nelson Guda

Tueplo Productions documentary “Spirit | Will | Loss”

Tux & Tom Productions

Ultimate Allstars

Upaya Dance Theatre

Valentina Vella - Interdisciplinary Artist

Voices of Health

Voices of Mosaic

WTMA Association

Yellowknife Navajo Flutes

YOUDANce

YOUNG NEW YORK

Youth Circus: Catalyst for Change

The Grassroots Game Conference in Philadelphia

2012-04-20T14:08:29Z

by diannedebicella

I’m headed down to Philadelphia on Tuesday, April 24th to attend The Grassroots Game Conference and to serve as a panelist about the Gamification of Fundraising.

The panel will specifically address gamified opportunities in fundraising, and related data analysis regarding donors. There are a number of social fundraising tools; we will be discussing how gameplay dynamics effectively increase reach and enhance other activities in a range of such elements.

When: April 24th, 2012, 1:30pm

Where: CBS Auditorium: Dorrance Hamilton Hall
320 S Broad St
Philadelphia, PA 19102

I hope to see you there!

Designing Robust Patron Records in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Beyond

2012-04-18T20:31:42Z

by Selena Juneau-Vogel

Artful.ly’s basic functions for selling tickets, tracking donations, and managing contacts are already being used by 100+ independent artists and small arts organizations. Later this week we’ll release a refreshed interface design that makes the whole app much more intuitive and downright hot.

Now that we’re all dressed up, we’re going out! Hittin’ the towns of Baltimore and Pittsburgh to research our next batch of features and improvements — building exceptional patron records.

Keeping track of your fans’ opinions, preferences, and connections is key to the success of any creative organization. We know that, but we want to know more, so we’re convening three Community Design Sessions to hear about what kind of patron information arts groups want to track. In Baltimore, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation will host two sessions on Tuesday, May 8th (9AM-1PM and 12-4PM). In Pittsburgh, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council will host one session on Thursday, May 10th (2:30-6PM).

At each of these Community Design Sessions we will address issues such as: What demographic, psychographic, and behavioralistic information do you want to know about your patrons? How do you classify or segment patrons for marketing purposes? How would you like to better manage your mass email campaigns? How would you like to integrate social media and patron records?

If you live in either of these cities and your role involves fundraising, marketing, ticketing, and/or community engagement then we’d love to have you join us! Please RSVP with the links below.

Email me if you have any questions or would like to host an Artful.ly Community Design session in your city.

And now, as a reward for reading this long post, a couple sneak peek screenshots of the new Artful.ly interface designs!

Now Hiring — Rails Developer

2012-04-24T18:00:12Z

by tim.cynova

Have any interest in helping to develop open source software for the cultural sector? Want to be a part of the ATHENA and Artful.ly development team? Stellar Ruby on Rails chops? We’re adding another developer to the crew and if you think you’ve got what it takes, we want to hear from you. Check out the full job posting.

Interviewing Your Marketing Firm: How to Find the Right Marketer or Publicist for You

2012-04-12T20:03:19Z

by Ciara Pressler

It’s that time again! Tweet at me for a chance to win a spot at the IAA Global Marketing Summit on April 26 in NYC!

I love meeting new people with great ideas that just need a little promotional push to get their business, event, or product on a roll. But what I don’t love is that last-minute panic that drives an otherwise-rational professional to make a rash decision about who they’ll bring on their team to captivate their target audience.

Here’s what I want you to ask me - or any marketing agency, PR firm, or marketing/communications candidate that will work for you - before you decide on your marketing team:

Do they understand your target audience?
This matters more than any other single factor. They must understand what the demographics that are most likely to want what you’re offering and how to capture their attention, whether patrons, press, or customers.

What’s their scope?
There are many areas of marketing, so be clear on what you need and what they can do - advertising, publicity, graphic design, web design, copywriting, social media strategy - will you need multiple vendors or can you get it all done in one place? Also, are they consultants or executors - do you want someone to coach you on how to do it in house, or do you want it taken care of for you?

What do their previous clients have to say?
Get those testimonials, references, and case studies. Let their reputation precede them.

What are the stats?
Some elements of marketing are immeasurable… but others are completely trackable. By how much have they grown a similar client’s audience? Have sales increased? Media impressions? What specific media placements have they landed before? On the flipside - run in the opposite direction if they over-promise specific results that just aren’t promise-able - no (ethical) marketer can guarantee sales and no publicist can guarantee placements (unless they’re publishing their own newspaper!), but they should be able to give you an idea of what you can reasonably expect and what needs to be done to reach your promotional goals.

Do they love your product?
Enthusiasm for your idea shines through the pitch. They’ll work harder and more passionately if they’re on board with your concept.

Will they listen to you?
I like to say to potential clients that they’re the parent, I’m just the nanny. Yes, I’m responsible for the growth and development of their company, but when it comes to the big decisions, it’s up to my client to call the shots and my job is to provide insight and support.

Have you comparison-shopped?
Engaging a marketing firm or even an individual freelancer can be a substantial investment. It can pay off to know who’s out there, what they can do, and what they charge before making a final decision. Talk to at least three different candidates, and meet in person or at least via video chat to get determine if you have rapport.

What’s your gut instinct?
If something just doesn’t sit right, even if you can’t put your finger on it, say thank you and move on.

And please, please do not choose solely on budget. Choose based on value - what are you getting for your investment, both in the short and long term? Great marketing is an investment in your business and its longevity - give it the consideration, dedication, and team it deserves.

Congratulations to Recently Approved Fiscally Sponsored Projects!

2012-04-04T11:36:06Z

by diannedebicella

In March our board approved 117 projects from 23 states. These projects applied for fiscal sponsorship in February. Check them out!

“Rightsizing”

27: a documentary

2nd Sundays Script Reading Series

A Beautiful Spell

A Big Project

a.pe.ri.od.ic presents: A John Cage Festival

American Wedding Film

Ann Schnake Projects

Art in Motion

Awesome Possum Theatre Symposium

Beasts & Lunatics with the Unsanctioned Interlocutor

BonafideWomen

BRUNO

Cancer Survivor’s Theatre/Film project

CD Recording - JoÃ£o Kouyoumdjian

Cecily and Gwendolyn’s Fantastical….”

Center for the Arts, Port au Prince

Chicago School of Blues

Cinema Forum Fukushima

COR Music Project

CreativeCitizens4CulturalChange

Dakota Apartments Documentary

Dark & Stormy Productions

DERORRIM PRODUCTIONS

Dialogue: Jamaica Plain’s Chamber Music Project

Did You Kiss the Dead Body: Visualizing Absence in the Archive

Dollar Burgers

Donnell Oakley Projects

Fifth Letter Productions Season

H2HFilms/ Gang Rape in Pakistan

Hands Down Entertainment

Heaven Adores You (an elliott smith project)

HOMEGROWN TAMPA BAY

Imaginal Disc Art Community Project

Imagination Creation Children’ Theatre

In Our Father’s Footsteps

IN THE PINK: the 1,000,000 people art project

Journey To Africa’s Burden

Karen Lewellen- communicating creatively!

Laura Napier

Live to Dream

Lone Star Theatre Company

MOVEiUS Dance performing season

Nell and the Bell

Noel and Company

NOIS - Network of Open Instrument Studios

Once I Was

One Soul Fellowship Quartet Tour in Tumen River

Our Ladies of South 4th Street

Pembroke Circle

permadirty project space

Pilot

Plantando Banderas

Portraits of Family House

Proud Kate Theatre Project

Ribbons of Hope

Samsun van Loon

Seniors Orchestral Society of NY

Senses Askew Company Event for Winter 2012/2013

The Directors’ Workshop

The Factorye

The Forum Project

The Hamlet Collective

The HOAX

The Movement Party

The Power to Heal (working title)

The Roddis Dress Collection

The Root Collective

The Shop

The Silent Killer

The Tailor’s Apprentice

The Values Project

The WhiteListed Theatre Company

The World Goes ‘Round

The York Shakespeare Company

Trust Art

Tumaini Film Project

USSSA (united secret society of subversive artists)

Veterans Project Pride

Virginia Independent Artist Society

War in Heaven, War on Earth

Fiscal Sponsorship and Fundraising Webinars

2012-04-04T11:36:20Z

by diannedebicella

Fractured Atlas is offering four different fiscal sponsorship and fundraising sessions by webinar in April. If you’ve never participated in a webinar before, there’s no need to worry - it’s quite easy. All you need is access to the internet.

When: Monday, April 9th, 2012, 7:30 - 8:30pm EST

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to RSVP.

When: Monday, April 16th, 2012, 7:30 - 8:30pm EST

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to RSVP.

Legal & Business Issues for Filmmakers and Producers
This webinar will provide an overview of the legal issues and common business arrangements used in film and television projects. In addition, option agreements for the acquisition of literary properties, distribution agreements, and a comprehensive release for reality based television programs will be discussed. We will also take a look at legal issues surrounding recent films such as Borat. This webinar is co-hosted by Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and is $35 for members and $45 for non-members. It is the first in a four part series of webinars co-hosted by VLA.

When: Monday, April 23rd, 2012, 6:00-7:30pm EST

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to register.

Tips and Tools for Measuring Your Success
More and more, funders aren’t satisfied to just give money away and hope for the best; they’re asking for measureable results. This webinar will walk you through standard program evaluation techniques and help you think through what to measure, why, and how.

When: Monday, April 30th, 2012, 7:30 - 8:30pm EST

Ian David Moss, our Research Director at Fractured Atlas will be presenting this webinar.

If you’d like to participate in the session, please click here to RSVP.

We’ll be hosting at least four different online sessions most months (the time of these sessions will vary from month to month), so keep your eyes on our blog for more upcoming sessions in May.

New Artful.ly Features Springing Up

2012-04-03T22:56:59Z

by Selena Juneau-Vogel

We’ve been hunkered down for the last couple months preparing for a spring refresh of Artful.ly’s user interfaces. Basic ticketing, receiving donations, and contact management are already fully functional features, but when the new design goes up in mid-April, Artful.ly is going to be smart and pretty.

In the meantime, our programmers have quietly released a bunch of little improvements you can use now:

Sleeker Storefronts: The Storefronts automatically generated by Artful.ly now include an event image and a venue map so you can put together an attractive ticket sales page, like this one, in just minutes.

More Info from Ticket Buyers: A customizable field in the Storefront shopping cart allows you to ask patrons a question during checkout. Use it for questions like ‘Would you prefer chicken or fish?,’ ‘What’s your guest’s name?,’ or ‘Do you have any special seating needs?’ And the new shopping cart design hovers over the Storefront and indicates how far along a customer is in the checkout process.

Also…

People Notes: Dated, searchable notes on People records help you keep track of your patrons’ biographical details and interests.
Customized Shopping Carts: A new wizard tool makes it easy to get the code you need to install a ticket and/or donation shopping cart widget on your own website.
Exportable Door Lists: CSV file export allows you to pull an up-to-date list of ticket sales info and format it however you like.

Summer Fellowships with Fractured Atlas

2012-04-24T18:02:10Z

by tim.cynova

Interested in being a marketing or research fellow with Fractured Atlas this summer? We have three positions in the mix.

Past fellows have drafted functional specification documents for our open source ATHENA project, written a spy serial, and dug into cultural data with Archipelago. Find out more about what we have in mind for this summer’s crew and how to apply:

Application deadline is April 20 so there’s enough time to file your taxes and an application.

Psst! Wanna See Some Fiscal Sponsorship Numbers?

2012-03-17T17:00:29Z

by diannedebicella

Last month, we rolled out live, detailed, and filterable financial statistics for our fiscal sponsorship program. These stats provide information on thousands of artists and arts organizations across the country within the fiscal sponsorship program. You can select filters to see how much they’ve raised and how it has been spent by sorting by discipline and by state.

You can find out interesting information, such as:

In FY11, $2,057,894.00 was released by Fractured Atlas in the U.S. to pay artist fees
Foundations contributed $1,990,446.00 to fiscally sponsored projects in FY11
79.7% of contributions received for film projects in CA in FY11 were from individuals compared with 57.4% in FY08

We’re excited to share this information and we welcome feedback!

For-profit Business Case Studies with a Twist

2012-03-18T17:44:16Z

by tim.cynova

I have always been drawn to the easily digestible and immediately applicable offerings of the Harvard Business Review Press. Need five extra hours in your day? Read the 40-page Guide to Getting the Right Work Done. New manager looking to improve your financial management chops? Try this quick read. Marketing strategy creation? Manage Mentor series.

Every month, I excitedly hold my Kindle waiting for the latest Harvard Business Review edition to download. Yep, I love it that much. One of my favorite parts in the HBR is the case study and commentary section. Each edition includes a fictional case study with responses from professionals who work in that field explaining how they would approach the case’s challenges. Two things always strike me about this section: (1) How familiar the management issues in the case seem, even when set in a field far askew from the cultural sector; and (2) It never fails, three professionals offering responses, three completely different ways of addressing the problem.

First rule of internet television: He who co-hosts and produces an internet television show — #SKYNOVA: The only internet TV show featuring culture warriors in their native habitat — gets to determine the content. For a while now, I’ve wanted to try out an idea that attempts to bring the case study commentary to life. Several weeks ago during the annual Dance/NYC Symposium I finally had my chance.

The Mission: Assemble some of the smartest rock stars that I, and my co-conspirator in this adventure Sydney Skybetter, know working in the cultural sector to offer their own solutions for these for-profit case studies. Then, discuss any parallels between the issues in the case study industries and ones we face in the cultural sector.

The Set-Up: Give each guest a week to review the case, minus the related commentary. Two guys with a video camera, access to a YouTube channel, and some expert video editing provided by Nel Shelby, gather their colleagues and film for 15 minutes of discussion.

The Result: #SKYNOVA: Cold Case Studies and video footage of these cultural sector rock stars in action.

Below is a round-up of all the episodes. Play along at home with the cases and please let us know what you think of the series. We’re planning to add more to the Cold Case Studies collection over the coming months. Stay tuned and stay classy internet!

Special thanks to the Harvard Business Review Press for making available to the general public a treasure trove of case studies, Lane Harwell and Dance/NYC for inviting #SKYNOVA to be a part of the Winter Symposium, Nel Shelby for making us look and sound far better than we do in real life, Jennifer Edwards for her expert portrayal of my co-conspirator Sydney Skybetter when he was stricken ill at the 11th hour, and to our panels of rock stars.

Future Technology & Tactics for Social Change panel in NYC

2012-03-16T20:24:40Z

by diannedebicella

IndieGoGo is hosting a panel on March 21st in NYC on Future Technology & Tactics for Social Change. The technology space has seen a juggernaut of new tools and online experiences launched daily. Amidst the countless conversations, what tools are being made available to truly evoke change, if at all? How do we consider what is missing and design for future innovation?

IndieGoGo has pulled together panelists from the worlds of creativity, design, business and education to discuss and assess how we provide tactics for social change. Join us for drinks and networking!

Moderated by Alex Goldmark (GOOD)
Speakers include:
Dianne Debicella (that’s me!), Ryan Jacoby (IDEO), Paul Voulas (Nerdi), and Slava Rubin (IndieGoGo)

Where:
Projective Space LES
72 Allen Street (3rd Floor)
Between Grand and Broome
New York, NY 10002

When:
Wednesday, March 21st
7:30-9:30pm

RSVP:
http://indiegogotacticsforsocialchange.eventbrite.com/

Congratulations to Recently Approved Fiscally Sponsored Projects!

2012-03-03T18:41:15Z

by diannedebicella

In February our board approved 124 projects from 24 states. These projects applied for fiscal sponsorship in January. Check them out!

“Abyss,” my senior film thesis

“Black on Broadway 2012: Home for the Holidays”

Anna Petrie, Mezzo-Soprano

ArtLab NYC

Between Us Productions

Chicago International Social Change Film Festival

CHIRON Performing Arts

Cloud of Fools Theater Company

Common Thread Contemporary Dance Company

Creating Change Communications

Creators’ Freedom Project

Dead White Zombies

Desperately Seeking the Exit

Direction Dance Ensemble

Dominica

Eric Hofbauer Artistic Projects

Exquisite Corps Theatre

Fortnight Journal

Fundamental Theater Project

GET DOWN Campaign

God Steeling

Hamilton Dramaturgy’s TheatreNow!

Handsome Little Devils

Heather Got Raped

I’m That Angel

International and European Choreographic Encounters

InVersion Theatre

Island Shakespeare

Jesse Aron Green Projects

Jostle

Jus-E Anti-bully campaign

La Sargento de la Concepción

Long Island City Ballet

Maeko Project

Maine Artist Collective

Makepeace

Marathon

Mark Haim Dance and Theater

Marshmallow Press Productions

Mosaic Arts Center

Muistardeaux Collective

NMS Expansion

Novo New Media

On Site Opera

Opportunity Music Project

Paula Atherton CD

Phillip Roebuck

Primary Source Concerts

Project Aloha

RE/generation

Unbooked Rental Times Made Searchable via Spaces

2012-04-30T14:12:00Z

by Lisa Niedermeyer

Imagine unbooked rehearsal and performance rental times across New York City being matched to renters looking for those exact rental times, simply by venues sharing their calendar via NYCPASpaces.org? Sure, many venues these days display a rental calendar on their own website (this is helpful) but I’m talking about aggregating unbooked rental times into a searchable marketplace (now we’re talking über helpful). Need a space in a specific part of the city, of a certain size, affordable rental rate and on a specific date and time? NYCPASpaces.org will match you to unbooked space via the new Availability search filter.

Sound too good, too convenient, too useful to be true? Here is how this new feature (part of the NYC Performing Arts Spaces 2.0 launch) breaks down:

How does the Availability search work? Renters who search NYCPASpaces.org for a specific date and time using the Availability filter will be matched to unbooked time of venues participating in the new online reservations system (currently in Private Beta). You can still apply other filters (i.e. rate, location, size) to narrow down your search even further.

What does this mean for venues interested in sharing their calendars? Sharing your calendar with NYCPASpaces.org does not share any of the specific information about reservations, it simply displays if a time is available or not. Unbooked times are included in Availability search results and automatically refreshed once a day.

How does a calendar get shared? We are currently focusing on iCalendar data feeds which are largely ubiquitous across different calendar software including Google, Outlook, Daylite, Appointment Plus, etc. As we move from Private Beta into Open Beta (Spring 2012) we will strategically explore integrating with other calendar software used in the arts and culture sector and keeping in mind we have Spaces websites in 10 other cities.

No, but seriously HOW is the calendar data shared… technically? Technically a calendar is shared via a url of a webhosted version of that same calendar. This does not mean your calendar needs to be public. You can share a privately webhosted calendar and display your unbooked times as “Available”.

What if I use more than one calendar to manage events in my space? You can enter 1 - n icalendar data feeds to reflect availability within the marketplace.

Can you help me picture this concept? See below

As product project manager of Spaces I’m super excited about the Availability search. I see great potential in saving venues and artists valuable time and resources. I also see a unique opportunity to leverage the marketplace of NYCPASpaces.org to better manage unused space or low traffic rental times across the field of performing arts. I encourage you to check out the listings of our early adapter beta tester rock star venues as well as giving Availability search a go. Let me know what you think. - Lisa Niedermeyer

Galaxy Smith Recording Studio

C enter for Performance Research

36 Street Studio

Interested in upgrading your free NYCPASpaces.org listing with ‘Share My Calendar’? Contact info@nycpaspaces.org

Don’t have a free NYCPASpaces.org listing but want in? Create your new listing here.