We’re on the cusp of the the 2018 orchestra compensation reports so what better topic to focus on for #TBT than finance?
First up, go look up the information your own dam*ed self at the Orchestra Financial Reports resource page (bunch of lazy kids with your Beethoven and Mary Jane…get off my lawn while you’re at it!). The reports page contains direct links to each orchestra’s financial reports page at GuideStar.org, a website that collects these documents to promote nonprofit transparency and to provide a central repository of nonprofit information that donors could use to guide their giving decisions.
From there, you can download the respective IRS filings for each orchestra.
If you’re not all about dumpster data diving then you can cut right to the chase and get those top shelf compensation figures for each season at the Orchestra Compensation Reports archive.
If you happen to be a data nerd and into orchestras, you’ve probably discovered that GuideStar only makes the three most recent seasons of IRS filings available. And three years is hardly enough to build trends.
For that, you need data from more years.
A. Lot. More.
Fortunately, I’ve started making my private stash of IRS filings available to anyone with a few bucks as instant downloads at the Adaptistration Store.
As of now, they go all the way back to the 2005/2006 season but we’ll be adding more over the summer until we reach back to the turn of the century!
The 5/19/18 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article by David Patrick Stearns that reports on a Philadelphia Orchestra concert being disrupted by…