Presentation as delivered to Andrew Taylor's "Survey of Arts Management" class at American University on October 1, 2012. Originally developed for the Arts Enterprise Summit 2012 in Claremont, CA.
2. Dual career: composer + arts admin (2002-07)
Worked in fundraising for national service org
MBA at Yale School of Management, 2007-09
Research Director, Fractured Atlas
3. Founded October 2007 (first year in b-school)
Personal journal to industry chronicle
0 to 3000 subscribers in <5 years
4. ArtsJournal
GIA News
Philanthropy News Digest
Arts Watch
You’ve Cott Mail
5. Google Reader
Createquity Highly Recommended Arts Blogs
Non-Arts Sources
FiveThirtyEight
Stanford Social Innovation Review
Harvard Business Review
ReadWriteWeb
Chronicle of Philanthropy
6. Barry’s Blog annual rankings
Foundation Center grant stats
Organizations to know
Grantmakers in the Arts
Americans for the Arts
NEA
National service orgs
Unions, industry associations, etc.
8. For analysis & interpretation
Createquity Arts Policy Library
For the documents themselves
Foundation Center’s PubHub
Grantmakers in the Arts website
Transition: So, in all of that time I’ve had to learn how to keep my pulse on what’s happening in my field. I started out reading maybe 3 blogs; now it’s almost 200. Plus newsletters, magazines, etc. And there are definitely some that are more helpful than others.
OK. In my opinion, though, it’s not enough just to be well-informed about what everybody else is talking about. It’s also important to be informed about the things that people are not talking about. And that’s where research comes in.