Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
I wish I could say Donor Advised Funds are less of a problem now than they were several years ago, but the reality is they are much worse. H/T to Joe Patti for pointing out the article from inequitable.org by Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery that reports Donor Advised Funds are now the largest cumulative recipients of Charitable Gifts. I wrote something about why Donor Advised Funds are bad for the …
There’s a fascinating report from SMU Data Arts on the Fundraising Performance over the first half of the pandemic. Spoiler: the arts sector saw a sizeable increase in their Return on Fundraising. For the purposes of the report, Return on Fundraising is determined by dividing Total Contributed Revenue but total Fundraising Expenses. Based on the data they collected, here’s what they discovered: 2017: fundraising efforts raised $6.16 for every dollar spent. …
Joe Patti published a fantastic article on 5/3/22 that examines labels attached to common nonprofit circumstances, like using “give” when communicating with patrons about donations. We’ve all encountered this at one point or another; retail stores frequently call customers “guests” and to a large degree, those changes are driven by expectations. Patti presents a few specific examples where the nonprofit sector could benefit from a similar approach and ultimately arrives at …
There’s a thought-provoking article by Peter Whoriskey in the 3/7/2022 edition of the Washington Post that examines the extent Russian oligarchs have contributed to US nonprofits, including those in the arts and culture sector. According to the article, the Anti-Corruption Data Collective has been uncovering the depth oligarch money has been funding arts and culture. “To produce the analysis, the collective scoured public sources for records of charitable contributions given personally …
While balancing political ideology across stakeholders has always been a core task for executives and fundraisers, that world has fundamentally changed over the past several years. It’s a topic we’ve examined across several articles. And the orchestra field certainly isn’t alone. To that end, Drew Lindsay published a pair of articles at The Chronicle of Philanthropy examining this issue from the broader perspective of the larger nonprofit sector. It’s worth pointing …