Last month, Ozzy and Sharon Ozbourne announced a new strategy for their annual summer Ozzfest concert tour. Their response to rising production costs, rising ticket prices, and declining attendance is this: stop charging customers to come, and stop paying bands to play. Essentially, through their new ”free admission” policy, Ozzfest is refocusing what it sells […]
I suppose it’s a form of customer service
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 […]
Artists crossing over (no, not into the afterlife)
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, […]
Stumbling towards ecstasy
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 […]
Managing yield, balancing guilt
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 […]
Staying exempt
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 […]
Sunday in the Park with Cans
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 […]
Revisiting a mission shift
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 […]
Buddhist Economics
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 […]
Perhaps the Luddites had a point
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 […]
