CASL and the charitable non-profit music school

Some big changes are coming this July with respect to Canada's anti-spam laws.  The new CASL legislation takes effect July 1, 2014.
Basically this new law completely rewrites the book on Spam and how for-profit and non-profit companies can broadcast their information to their clients.

It will not have any effect on the spam you receive from outside of Canada (which is where well over 90% of all spam originates from), but it will impact how local business is conducted in this country, from client mailing lists to newsletters.

The big change is that you can no longer opt into a mailing list or email list by default. You must not only have clear methods for your subscriber list to "unsubscribe" but each subscriber to your lists must make a concrete action to subscribe in the first place.

The good news is registered charities are exempt from some of the most stringent rules being applied to the for-profit businesses.  Clearly your local charities would be in dire straights if it were suddenly illegal for them to ask for donations.
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Job Opennings at BCACMS Schools

We have some positions at BCACMS schools listed on our site.  Follow the link here

1) Chilliwack Academy of Music - Principal
2) String Instructors - Central Valley Academy
3) Suzuki Piano Instructor - Nanaimo BC.

Metro Vancouver presents "Survivor 101" workshops

Following on the success and feedback of the inaugural “Survivor 101” workshop in November 2012, the Regional Cultural Development Advisory Committee, through Metro Vancouver, has partnered with 4 municipalities throughout Metro to present SURVIVOR 101 THE NEXT GENERATION. This series will focus on funding, audience development, marketing and board development - key areas that participants expressed an interest in learning more about.

If you are a staff member, board member, volunteer, performer, artist, start-up visionary, or tenaciously holding on to a community arts organization in the terminal stages of decline, these workshops are for you!

Check the website for more details.

October 29 - Getting your funding ducks in a row
November 21 - audience development
February 2014 - Marketing 101
March 6, 2014 - Board development

Arts Activities and Charitable Registration

After more than two years of study and consultation, the Canada Revenue Agency has just released an important paper on “Arts Activities and Charitable Registration Guidance”. While the paper may, on the surface of things, seem to apply only to those arts organizations who are seeking charitable status, this is not the case: it is important reading for organizations that wish to ensure that they are well-positioned to maintain their charitable status.  If your organization values its charitable status, it is essential that this review be coordinated with the CRA’s latest thinking.

Thanks to Orchestra Canada for sharing this.

5 Ways to Make LinkedIn Board Connect Work for Your Nonprofit

LinkedIn Board Connect for nonprofits from LinkedIn for Good

With nearly two million nonprofit board seats open, good board members are hard to find. Most nonprofits know that looking for board members can be time-consuming and frustrating. I’ve been there, on the hunt for people who have the expertise and passion to make a positive contribution to the nonprofit I care about.

Read the article here

Promoted Facebook Posts for Non-profits

Earlier this month in my post "Advertising on Social Media"  I explored some thoughts on how effective advertising on social media sites such as Facebook is for small non-profits.  My main point was that social media sharing sites are places where we go to "find out stuff" about friends, relatives, colleagues and each other.

Heather Mansfield in her recent blog post Promoted Facebook Posts for Non-profits: The ROI of $30 spent in advertising shows us how she measured the difference in reach between a Facebook status update that received $30 of ads vs. a status update post that received no special promotion at all.  The bottom line seems to be a 4% increase on exposure on one post for the $30 spent compared to a control post that received no special attention or promotion.  The author feels that $3 would be a better price for this kind of online exposure than $30 and for small low budget non-profits advertising on Facebook is somewhat useless.

The question I ask is how does this really compare with other online ads such as Google or using other online sites such as Craigslist? If a traditional local community newspaper ad increased awareness of your organization by 4% would that be considered to be worthwhile? How about niche non-profit arts organizations that promote the study of classical, jazz and world musics?

If we assume 100% of the population is interested in what we are doing, then 4% seems low. But what percentage of the population is interested in our mission in the first place? If I spend $150 on a display ad in a local paper, it may reach 50,000 readers. But of those readers, what percentage might actually be interested? Of that small percentage of people interested , what percentage is actually going to act on the information in the ad? I suspect that the number is much, much less than 4%.  So is this another case of "we see what we look for" and our perceptions are being skewed by preconceived biases that we have before we even start?

My question is "How can we develop a meaningful set of metrics that can help small non-profits with tiny marekting budgets efficiently evaluate the effectiveness of these various strategies?"

Advertising on Social Media

Since Facebook's grand entry into the world of public trading, or rather lacklustre entry into public trading many are wondering about the value of social media sites in terms of their revenue building potential. So the grand question becomes "Is it good value to advertise on Facebook?"

Some media articles are pointing towards the "no" campaign, like this article in the Globe and Mail that says "Facebook ads just don't work: Poll"  The problem is that if you go out an poll the "Average Joe" on the street they would tell you television ads don't work either. The point being the "Average Joe" on the street in this case is the wrong person to ask.

Companies that buy ads are the people to ask. GM is cancelling its ads on Facebook, but would you buy a car just because you saw a Facebook ad? Would you buy a car just because you saw a TV ad? Would you buy a car because of that radio ad advertising a free ipad 3 which each purchase? The only place I actually listen to the "radio" these days is guess where? Driving in my car!  Hmmmm.....

Bigger question to ask is "why do people use social media"?  There are lots of reasons but "I have a great gob of disposal income to spend today and I want to something to spend it on so I am logging into my facebook account" would be a notion pretty far down on most people's lists (those types would be better to log into their ebay accounts!)
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Standards Program for nonprofits

A new program from Imagine Canada  (see below)

Imagine Canada's new Standards Program launched on May 8th!  Designed to strengthen public confidence in the charitable and nonprofit sector, the Standards Program is among the first of its kind at a national level.  It offers accreditation to charities and nonprofits that can demonstrate excellence in five key areas:

• board governance;
• financial accountability & transparency;
• ethical fundraising;
• staff management; and,
• volunteer involvement.

The Standards Program is first and foremost a capacity-building initiative. Any organization may use the standards to improve and monitor its practices. Information about how to comply with the standards, as well as tools and resources to help organizations continue to strengthen their practices, is available free of charge. Organizations wishing to demonstrate publicly that they meet the standards can participate in a voluntary peer-review-based accreditation process.  Download our Overview of the Standards Program powerpoint for more information.

Mission: To build excellence within Canada’s charities and nonprofits through common standards of practice and to strengthen confidence in the sector.

The Standards Program is first and foremost a capacity-building initiative. Any organization may use the standards to improve and monitor its practices. Information about how to comply with the standards, as well as tools and resources to help organizations continue to strengthen their practices, is available free of charge. Organizations wishing to demonstrate publicly that they meet the standards can participate in a voluntary peer-review-based accreditation process.

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BC Culture Days

Culture Days is a collaborative, Canada-wide volunteer movement to raise the awareness, accessibility, participation and engagement of all Canadians in the arts and cultural life of their communities. The first annual Culture Days event swept across more than 700 Canadian cities and towns during the last weekend of September 2010, generating an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm in the process. This year’s Culture Days weekend will take place on September 28, 29 & 30. Once again, the event will feature free, hands-on, interactive activities that invite the public to participate “behind the scenes”—and to discover the world of artists, creators, historians, architects, curators, and designers at work in their community.

As a grassroots, collaborative movement, Culture Days relies on your participation. Whether as an arts or cultural organization, an artist, a municipality, a school, a citizen, a business person…everyone can play a role in shaping this event. So get involved! Browse the 2012 Activities to learn more about what to expect in British Columbia as Canadians from coast to coast to coast prepare for the second annual Culture Days weekend this fall!

Demand for More Arts Organizations is Internally - not Externally - Driven

I believe from my own experience in working in the arts in BC that there is truth in this article right here at home. Indeed many arts organizations are not formed based on any perceived actual demand or need from the community.  One of the basic tenants of Barry's argument I think is by no means limited to just arts organizations; that need for all of us to have some control of our own destiny in terms of our spiritual, work and artistic lives.

Many organizations, not just arts organizations unfortunately create environments where the individual artists or in the non-arts corporate world "employees" become frustrated and leave a workplace because the top-down traditional management style does not seem to value their opinions, their beliefs, or their work. Yes many new artistic endeavours are formed by artists simply seeking employment; or on a larger level sometimes pre-existing organizations find what seems to be an opportunity to extend their mandate perhaps beyond where it realistically should be and wind up confusing their traditional support base in the process. But this happens in the traditional business world everyday as well.  I have been struck time and time again how here in the "wild west" sometimes artists form new concert series, ensembles, and yes even music and arts training and performance organizations are created more out of some perceived personal or organizational need, rather than a good simple analysis of the forces of supply and demand within the communities that they exist. Only Barry's third point seems to take external forces into account (see below).  At the end of the day however, the Darwinian notion of "survival of the fittest" still seems to apply, as even with the best of intentions, not all of us will succeed. Welcome to the free marketplace!

The rest of this post is a quotation from "Barry's Blog" - Sunday May 6th, 2012

The question though is why do so many (of our) people apparently feel the need to start new organizations rather than find a platform for what they want to do within the existing infrastructure? What are the needs that are not being met that gives rise to this kind of unbridled growth - given that the public demand is, at best, constant? We don't seem to have any reliable hard data that would give us some handle on the motivations of all of those that feel compelled to go outside what exists and start a new structure to do what it is they want to do. So we don't have any real discussions about whether or not there are factors at play that we might be able to impact so as to give those seemingly dissatisfied or unhappy with the existent structures available to them more opportunity to stay within the infrastructure as an alternative to going outside of it with yet another new enterprise. It would be enormously valuable to have some reliable data as to the reasoning behind this trend.

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The Problem with "Problemization" in Arts Funding

I discovered an excellent article on the weekend that really gets to the heart of matter when it comes to the whole notion of  "project driven" and "problem driven" methods of arts funding.  This one is well worth a read if you are at all involved in raising funds in the non-profit world.

I wasn’t sure whether or not problemization was a word until I looked it up and found that it is one. Problemization is to consider or treat as a problem (Merriam Webster).

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. The reason is that increasingly when you look at a foundation’s grant guidelines you are asked: “What problem are you trying to solve?” I put the following into Google: “Foundation funding what problem are you trying to solve.” The search result: 182 million hits that included dozens of foundations’ guidelines and many articles about how to write successful grant proposals. The additional question is “What is the need or problem that will be eliminated if your request is granted?” (And subsequent questions about how you identified and documented the problem, what logic model you followed to design your solution and how will you measure your results.)

I wonder what effect this culture of pathology, of diagnosis and treatment, is having on the nonprofit sector in general and the cultural sector in particular. Do foundations increasingly see themselves in the role of a sort of benevolent physician, identifying social “disease” and using their grants as the medication needed for wellness to be achieved? Not that long ago, a primary framework for organized philanthropy was one of ideas and experimentation; the mindset was one of risk capital and the ability to fuel new ideas that are interesting and should be tried.

The problem/solution framework is especially insidious for the arts. Yes, we do solve problems in the arts, particularly we work on aesthetic and philosophical problems, though these are not problems a foundation could help solve (at least not directly). In fact, the problems we solve are not easily documented, it is difficult to apply a social scientist’s approach to them, and our documentation of results is more likely qualitative than quantitative.

Read the article here

Is Sustainability Sustainable?

By the principal consultants of WolfBrown with Joanna Woronkowicz

Historically, sustaining an arts organization meant generating enough earned and contributed revenue to fund current operations. With so much continued change and turmoil in the arts industry, WolfBrown set out to reconsider what sustainability means in 2011.

Why are some arts groups able to persevere – and even thrive – when they are chronically “under-capitalized” and perpetually on the brink of extinction? On the other hand, why are well-established, large institutions with sizable endowments filing for bankruptcy? What, besides strong finances, does sustainability require? Is it possible that financial security actually deters sustainability?

Reflecting back on several decades of work with funders and arts organizations, we propose a more nuanced and multi-dimensional view of sustainability – one that encompasses and transcends the current dialogue on capitalization, adaptive capacity and other elements of good management. In our view, sustainability requires a balancing act with three interdependent but sometimes competing priorities:

• Community Relevance
• Artistic Vibrancy
• Capitalization

Together, these elements give organizations the ability to excel in a permanent state of flux, uncertainty and creative tension.

Is Sustainability an Illusion?

On December 16th, 2002, the San Jose Symphony – having played to audiences for over 120 years – declared bankruptcy. Its assets were sold and an institution that had once been the pride of a growing city suddenly ceased to exist. Many were shocked; how could an arts organization with such a long history and sizeable endowment fail? Throughout the late 1990s, the orchestra’s ticket sales had increased by fifty percent and government support remained stable. In the first fiscal year of the new millennium, however, ticket sales declined twelve percent. More significantly, private support for the orchestra decreased by half over a span of four years. While revenues decreased, expenses increased. At the opening of its 2002 season, the orchestra found itself in dire straits. Reluctantly, a weary board of directors, unable to reorganize and remain solvent, declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Contrast this story to that of another nonprofit arts organization, the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, which opened 30 years ago when Kermit the Frog and his creator, the late Jim Henson, cut the ceremonial ribbon. Now a $3.5 million organization, the Center’s live performances, exhibits and distance learning programs generate roughly half a million visits annually. Demand for the Center’s programs has remained stable and expenses have been carefully controlled, producing consistent operating results. In response to a major donation to the Center from Jim Henson’s family of puppets and other objects from their personal collection, a capital campaign is underway to renovate and expand the Center’s facilities, including a commitment to raise additional endowment to cover increased operating expenses. While other organizations in Atlanta have struggled to raise sufficient capital for new facilities, the Center for Puppetry Arts sees great community demand for its expansion, which will enable it to double the number of unique visitors and increase operating revenues by seventy-five percent.

Seemingly sustainable in a financial sense, the San Jose Symphony was not able to rebound after a few difficult years. With its structural deficit exposed, the orchestra’s value proposition to San Jose’s diverse community was not sufficient to generate the level of support required to reorganize, nor was it able to rescale its operations to align with demand. In contrast, the Center for Puppetry Arts – consistently operating on shoestring budgets – continues to grow in relevance to its community and to be recognized for its managerial and artistic excellence by national as well as local funders.

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B.C. finance committee not recommending increased arts funding

For the first time since 2007, the B.C. government’s standing committee on finance has not recommended an increase in arts funding.

Arts and culture receive just one short line in the committee’s report, released earlier this week: “Recognize the economic benefits of a vibrant arts and culture sector.”

Last year, for the second year in a row, the committee had called on the province to return arts funding to 2008/09 levels. It also recommended that eligibility criteria for community gaming grants be revisited, and that the government reinstate gaming grants for three years to provide stability.

In 2007, the committee called on the government to consider a boost to the B.C. Arts Council and support the province’s artists and cultural organizations, “such that B.C.’s total arts funding from all government sources is not less than third highest amongst the Canadian provinces.” The following year, it recommended increasing the council budget to $32 million.

Amir Ali Alibhai, executive director of the Alliance for Arts and Culture, noted that the committee’s recommendations haven’t held much sway in the past with regards to arts funding. “In the past, they always have [recommended increased arts funding] and it’s never seemed to make a difference,” he said.

Spencer Chandra Herbert, the NDP’s arts critic, said he was dismayed by the committee’s report. “It doesn’t send me a good message in terms of the Liberals’ support for the arts,” he told the Straight. “It also shows me that they don’t understand the economic benefits of investing in the arts, despite their words here. Action has to follow words.”

Chandra Herbert also noted that, for the first time, the bipartisan committee did not work on a consensus, but instead the Liberals released the report with asterisks highlighting what the party deemed the most pressing recommendations. The recommendations regarding the arts was not one of them.

“We had to vote against the finance committee report, which the first time we’ve done that in quite a few years, because the Liberals decided they would do whatever they wanted anyway without coming to some sort of consensus,” he said

From The Georgia Straight

How Can Inter-Organizational Collaboratives Build Trust?

Here is an article from Charity Village Research about how organizations can work to build inte-rorganizational  collaboaratives.  By Joan Roberts, Septebmer 19, 2011

You hear it all the time. For a collaborative to become successful there needs to be a high level of trust amongst its members. I agree. Trust is needed for collaborative members to share important and relevant information and work out issues that cross their organizational boundaries. But what exactly is trust? It can be an elusive concept. Trust is an emotion or a feeling held by an individual based on observations, facts and gut instinct that tells you that you can rely on a person, product or process to do what it is supposed to do. In a collaborative we are relying on each other to do what we are supposed to do. And if we can't deliver on our commitments then we need to talk about why and then figure out how to the task done.
Yet you must often compete with other collaborative members for funding or profile — so how you can trust a competitor? This often is the crux of the problem.

Despite being competitors, private and nonprofit sector organizations often find ways to work together. It is the only way industry standards ever develop. Private sector competitors join together in industry associations to work together on common causes like industry standards and regulatory frameworks. Nonprofits cooperate in a similar manner in sector organizations that advocate on behalf of their members.
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Top 10 Things to Look for in New Board Members

From Gail Perry's Blog


Here is Gail Perry's list of top qualities to look for in Board members for non-profit organizations (warning – it may not be a politically correct list!):

1. A person of influence and connections. 
Above all, I like to have people who know other people and can make things happen. My favorite board member is someone who can pick up the phone and help us make a key connection. This type of board member can open new doors for us and help us network at a new level. They know people with resources, and people who can influence others on our behalf.

2. Deep passion for our work.
Do they have the passion and care for our mission? If they do not, they may bring a clinical approach to our work and miss the heart of what we do.

3. Time and willingness.
Some of the most wonderful people simply don’t have the time. Even if they are wildly passionate, they may be on the road all the time or stacked up with family and work commitments. Even the most passionate board member is unhappy if they feel that they are not fulfilling their commitment to the organization. So be sure they have the time.
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Arts Summit 2011

Arts Summit 2011 will showcase our excellence en masse, our group wisdom in action, and you our culture makers.

For two days we will be gathering collaborative and ingenious minds to share strategies, stories, build strength and expand capacity, complexity and connectivity in our arts communities.

Our broad themes will explore how arts organizations and artists are addressing:

• Value and Worth

• Audiences, Volunteers and Non-professionals

• Venues and Placemaking

• Quality of Life in the Arts

Peer-to-Peer dialogues in our Breakout Rooms will help identify existing and upcoming interests and priorities, the assets, people power and strategies needed to move forward. Come talk with us.

Your voice is requested.
This year will also highlight the achievement of Vancouver’s publishers. A book market will feature Vancouver authors, artists and the city as subject.

Some of the speakers confirmed so far include:

• Jane Heyman, pioneer theatre maker, educator and Performing Arts Lodge Vancouver co-founder;

• Sandy Garossino, publisher, businessperson, and specialist in arts governance and advocacy;

• David Pay, artistic director - Music on Main;

• Mo Dhaliwal, founder of the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration and Asian Heritage Month Society president;

• Sadira Rodrigues, curator, writer and director, Continuing Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design;

• Aaron Schubart, music programmer with the Donnelly Group;

• Tracey Friesen, executive producer, National Film Board Canada Pacific & Yukon Centre

• Martha Rans, copyright educator at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, project lead at Creative Commons Canada, legal director with Artists Legal Outreach;

• Irwin Oostindie, W2 Media and Arts Centre executive director;

• Russell Wallace, Summit featured artist, composer, producer and traditional Lil’wat singer.

Register now to take advantage of the Early Bird rate, and stay tuned for further programming announcements.

Check out the Arts Alliance website for more information and registration information.

Why Your Board needs Term Limits

Is your board reluctant to enforce term limits? If so, the board is in danger of becoming stale and set in its ways. And when that happens, your entire organization may be at risk - sooner than you think. This is a very, very dangerous place for any nonprofit in today’s wildly shifting environment.

Five Boards Gone Down the Wrong Path
Here are the stories of five boards gone wrong:

1. The Martyrs.

This board is full of hard-working martyrs. They kill themselves with work – doing things that staff could or should be doing.
They complain:

“We work SO hard and we’re SO burned out. Woe to us.”

The irony is that this board worked very hard to enlist “diverse” members.
But when the highly valued new members saw this group’s attitude and what was expected, the new members fled.

DOWNSIDE:
Martyr boards are no fun. They drive new people away.
The worst thing is that this board will not be able to develop new leaders: a very serious problem for the future.

 Read the article at Gail Perry's Blog

Diane Ragsdale on the State of the Art

This keynote address is very similar to the one Diane gave at the Arts Alliance in Vancouver about 2 years ago.

Well worth a few minutes of your time.

Diane Ragsdale on Surviving the Culture Change (Full Remarks) from Arts Alliance Illinois on Vimeo.

Perhaps we need to rethink which nonprofit arts groups are considered leaders in their fields?

Diane Ragsdale who was here in Vancouver two years ago as the keynote speaker for the Arts Alliance conference now has her own blog where she comments on her own research and on the state of the current arts scene in the US, and I believe is trying to find a balanced perspective as to what is really happening here in the arts scene in Canada and the US.  The blog post I have reprinted below is worthy of a read through, we have been experiencing similar funding battles on this side of the 49th parrallel and many of the points she makes are quite valid here as well. To highlight her points that I think are valid for us in BC I have used italic coloured text (this is not in the original)

from Diane Ragsdale:

Many have written in the past week on the pending and proposed eliminations of the Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina state arts agencies (among others). For a roundup of the news on this front I recommend this post on Createquity. Some see these attacks as yet another sign that the country is filled with philistines, some see them as symbolic or purely political, and others as the reasonable end of decades of disregard by arts organizations of their communities-at-large.

The arts (which in the minds of most people equates with ‘the fine arts’) are clearly not everyone’s cup of tea (and no amount of rhetoric will probably change this); having said this, it would be shortsighted to dismiss current attacks as being driven primarily by barbarians. Many politicians evidently perceive that they can safely target the arts for cuts on the basis of their being exclusive, elitist, extravagant, or wealthy (and suggest that taxes and subsidies would be better directed elsewhere) because the arts often serve and are defended by a relatively small percentage of their constituencies. Furthermore, and rather unfortunately,these arguments against the arts are not just political rhethoric; they are reasonable accusations that can be plausibly lobbed at more than a few so-called ‘flagship’ nonprofit arts groups.

Candidly, I find it increasingly difficult to defend why a nonprofit theater company (even, and especially, outside of NYC) needs to charge $100+ for its tickets, or why a nonprofit opera company needs to charge nearly twice as much, if not more. I’ll save for another day my thoughts on the downsides of coupling the price of admission and the value of the arts experience in the minds of consumers, but for now suffice it to say I agree with those who have expressed the opinion that lowering ticket prices (or otherwise reducing financial barriers) is the number one change that many flagship, fine arts groups need to make–both to demonstrate that they are earnest about being ‘inclusive’ and to increase attendance

Secondly, for decade upon decade, many arts organizations have essentially paid lipservice to their educational missions, despite the fact that many people do not have meaningful exposure to the arts growing up and there is research that suggests that such exposure is linked to adult participation. (It seems that it would be in the best interest of arts groups to take their educational missions more seriously.) Nonetheless, I recognize that, in particular, hands-on participation activities are not (today) a core competency of many arts groups (although one might posit that over the next 10 years they will need to become so).

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Why work doesn't happen at work

Jason Fried has a radical theory of working; basically implying that the environment of the modern office isn't a good place to acutally get work done.. At TEDxMidwest, he lays out the main problems (call them the M & Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.