Drew McManus on the Orchestra business | est. 2003

Stepping Up The Nonprofit CRM Challenge

Wed, Aug 8, 2015
Adaptistration People 043
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems seem to be a popular topic this season; in July, 2015, Nonprofit Quarterly ran an article that discussed the rabbit hole that is evaluating and identifying CRM proposals (which we examined here) and the 8/12/2015 edition of DestinationCRM.com published an opinion piece by a CRM CEO lamenting the lack of

Not Only Will Live Symphonic Music Get You Laid, But Your City Is Crap If You Don’t Have An Orchestra

Tue, Aug 8, 2015
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In a recent interview with The Evening Standard’s David Smyth, singer-songwriter Ben Folds recently expanded on his previous sentiments that live orchestra concerts are an ideal vehicle to maximize verbing the adjective noun by declaring “there are two kinds of cities: those that have symphony orchestras and those that are crap.” There are two kinds

Chicago’s Latest Tourism Ad Is A Stark Reminder About The Importance Of An Effective Government Affairs Committee

Mon, Aug 8, 2015
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TimeOut Chicago published an article by Clayton Guse on 8/21/15 that examines a 15 minute city tourism from 1977 juxtaposed against a 2015 counterpart. Granted, if the only media from the 70s era to survive the millennia is the “Chicago Is” ad, future humans will have a superb idea of what that time period was

Binghamton Cancels Opening Concert. Reasons Unclear.

Fri, Aug 8, 2015
Adaptistration People 131
The latest labor dispute to cancel scheduled 2015-2016 concert event activity transpired this week at New York’s Binghamton Philharmonic. The orchestra’s board made the decision to cancel their opening concert after failing to reach a mediated agreement with musicians for a new collective bargaining agreement after the previous agreement expired on 5/21/15. The orchestra’s FY2012

ICSOM’s Conference Sidesteps Equal Pay For Equal Work And Substitute Parity

Thu, Aug 8, 2015
Adaptistration People 163
Toward the end of summer, the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM), a players’ conference within the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) that represents over 4,000 regularly employed orchestra musicians from 52 professional US orchestras, holds its annual conference and this year’s event is in Philadelphia from 8/26/15 through 8/29/15. Traditionally, ICSOM conferences are

It’s Never Been Easier To Be An Expert

Wed, Aug 8, 2015
ArtsHacker.com
Online security is a big deal. Check that, it’s a really big deal and far too often, arts orgs and their managers don’t take as much time as they should to protect themselves and their institution. I published an article at ArtsHacker.com today that examines the five most common practices of security experts and the

Adaptistration’s Most Popular Content Is…

Tue, Aug 8, 2015
Adaptistration People 151
Well this is a surprise. It’s been awhile since I went digging through metrics data stretching back though the time Adaptistration started using Google Analytics (late 2008), but some recent data mining uncovered that within the last year, a new post has risen to the number one spot for most visited content: Orchestra Financial Reports.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Transforming The Field

Mon, Aug 8, 2015
Adaptistration People 096
On 8/7/2015, Americans For The Arts published an article by Jason Tseng (h/t @YouveCottMail) titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Transforming The Field that introduces a frank conversation about disparity and arts funding. You should absolutely take the time to read the full piece as there are a number of superb ideas;

Some Intriguing Quiz Results

Fri, Aug 8, 2015
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Let’s end the week by following up on Wednesday’s NEA funding quiz; spoiler alert: if you haven’t taken the quiz yet but are interested in testing your knowledge, you don’t want to jump to the results below. In short, out of the 312 respondents, most failed and the division of grades created a nice looking

Better Marketing Copy Though GiaS (Girl-In-A-Starbucks)

Thu, Aug 8, 2015
Adaptistration People 162
Joe Goetz is back to blogging at Scanning The Dial and his first foray is a terrific post about the way arts orgs, orchestras in particular, communicate what they do in marketing materials; spoiler alert: it’s pretty drab. Goetz references a 7/1/2015 post from marketing consultant Trevor O’Donnell about applying the Gal-in-a-Starbucks (GiaS) test to
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