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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Business Support for Communities Could be Waning

This study is based on what is happening in the US, but in many respects Canada is not following far behind.

Harvard Business School just released its first study of US competitiveness, reporting that almost two-thirds of US businesses will locate their new plants outside the US. President Obama addressed the issue in his State of the Union address, citing the same blocks to US competitiveness the study does, namely poor education and training, our complex tax code and regulations, crumbling infrastructure, and lack of political soundness.

None of this is surprising. But for me, one finding was truly shocking: only 22 percent of US managers believe that doing good for their communities will help their business.

Has the economic pressure really had that extreme an impact? I remember just a few years ago that managers believed that doing good for their communities was critical to their business and their reputations. Over the 15 years I consulted to Cisco, I heard President (then Chairman) John Morgridge say over and over, “We do well by doing good” and prove it with network training programs for poor students that expanded Cisco’s industry and customer base. Even today, Cisco is highly rated by CSRHub for its corporate citizenship. In 2008, an Economist study showed that over half of its executive readers linked good deeds to increases in their brand value and over 40 percent believed that corporate social responsibility (CSR) led to decisions that were better for business in the long-term. As recently as 2009, a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that 60 percent of business leaders worldwide believe CSR had increased in importance over the previous year. Only 6 percent said it was a lower priority.

Read the article here

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.

What’s Wrong With Music Biz?

The basic recording contract upon which most of the popular music business has been based for the past 50 years is fundamentally broken.
This is not the sentiment of one of the countless critics who throw stones at the music industry from afar, usually for vague philosophical reasons, but rather the pragmatic opinion of a true insider: Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, which sold millions of records by hip-hop artists including Club Nouveau, Coolio, De La Soul, Digital Underground, Everlast, House of Pain and Naughty By Nature.

Silverman also feels that the value of social networking sites like Facebook has been overated and that actually these sites have done little more than generate "noise" by obscuring the true working artists by having them blended in to what amounts to the amateur music scene.

All those together don’t make up for the drop. For example, in 2008 there were 17,000 releases that sold one copy. Last year, there were 18,000, and something like 79,000 releases that sold under 100 copies. Under 100 copies is not a real release — it’s noise, an aberration. In any kind of scientific study, it would be filtered out. It’s like a rounding error. That 79,000 number represents almost 80 percent of all the records released that year.

80 percent of all records released are just noise — hobbyists. Some companies like TuneCore are betting on the long tail because they get the same $10 whether you sell one copy or 10,000. Who uses Photobucket and Flickr? Not professional photographers — those are hobbyists, and those are the people who are using TuneCore and iTunes to clutter the music environment with crap, so that the artists who really are pretty good have more trouble breaking through than they ever did before.

Read More at Wired Magazine.

The effect of the Global Economic Recession on Canada's Creative Economy

 From The Cultural Human Resources Council:
The Effect of the Global Economic Recession on Canada's Creative Economy
in 2009
Full document (PDF)

National Compesation Study update for management and admin in NPO Arts Organizations

From The Cultural Human Resources Council: 

National Compensation Study - 2009 Update for Management and Administration in Not-for-Profit Arts Organizations (2009)
The National Compensation Study for Management and Administration in Not-for-Profit Arts Organizations is an update of a similar study released in 2003. Data was gathered on base salary, employee benefits and perquisites, as well as a number of other human resources issues from over 200 organizations within the not-for-profit arts sector.
Full document (PDF)

Mastering the Art of Interveiwing

For those of us in the world of Non-profit management, here is an interesting article from BC Business magazine about the fine art of interviewing canditates for your job postings. Those of us working in the arts have to deal with a lot of the same issues as our busniess colleagues, but usually with a lot less resources at hand.

BC Business magazine - article

Stanford Social Innovation Review : Articles : The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle (August 18, 2009)

Stanford Social Innovation Review : Articles : The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle (August 18, 2009)

A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.
 
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Before the Music Dies

Here is a link to an eye opening documentary from 2006 about the shape of the music industry today. What does it take to become the next great pop sensation? Practice, practice, practice? Well, in the words of Gershwin; "It ain't neccessairly so'. Pop acts today are synthetic constructs more designed more in terms of bringing profits to shareholders rather than having any sort of artistic message.

As Bradford Marcellus points out many of our pop heroes of the past 30 years "wouldn't have a chance today" in our music industry that now focuses on youth and good looks, rather than honesty and having soul.

Narrated by Academy Award® Winner Forest Whitaker, BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES is an unsettling and inspiring look at today’s popular music industry featuring interviews and performances by Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, Branford Marsalis, and a wide variety of others. The documentary film has built a passionate following as “the most important film a music fan will ever see” (XM Radio) by providing “a balanced overview of the state of the rock scene of America” (The Wall Street Journal) and adding “passion to the eternal debate about the industry” (The New York Times). Last year, BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen walked away from traditional Hollywood distribution to instead pursue a large-scale grassroots release with B-Side Entertainment.

Cumulitive advantage, popularity and the arts

So we do we think something is good because we are independent creatures of thought, or is it because everyone else likes it so we think we should like it too? So why did projects such as Harry Potter and Star Wars get such a cold response from their peers when they were starting out? Why did they become popular when no one in the beginning wanted to publish them or finance these projects?

I would like to think I am somewhat independent soul capable of making my own decisions. but science might indicate otherwise. (I found this article through a friend's facebook link - there must be some irony in that.)

New York Times: Is Justin Timerlake a product of Cumulative Advantage? April 15, 2007 - Duncan J. Watts

The Digital Concert Hall

Now you can subscribe to concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from the other side of the planet. You can purchase "online" tickets to virtual concerts of real performances broadcast through quality streaming video

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Inside the Music Business

This month's BC Business Magazine features an interview with music business insiders Sam Feldman, Bruce Allen, and Terry McBride about the current shape of the recording industry in Canada. The article by Chris Cannon asks some tough questions about the music and recording industry in Canada and abroad, the nature of the industry today and the effects of new media and technology upon the development of bands and new artists.

Our music choices today are much more varied and diverse than say twenty or thirty years ago, Terry McBride points out that the development of the CD itself forced the industry to release 60 min. recordings instead of the old 35 - 40 min formats from LP's, which in some ways had an effect of lowering the quality by giving the consumer more product than they wanted. CD's while possibly having a better sound created higher prices for the same product. Also the new format created the notion of "pull" rather than "push" . With CD's you could choose to listen to track 3 over and over again, and only listen to track 3, something that is much more awkward to do with a turntable or cassette. Old technology used the "push" marketing strategies where the big corporations would decide what would be produced and what would receive air play. The mass market mediums are no longer Radio and TV, but video games and the internet, which has changed everything.

The new world is now based on "pull" where the new millennial generation pulls content from the internet or from online stores, rather than being "pushed" upon us by the mass market mainly through radio.

Spin City - Article in BC Business Magazine - December 1st, 2008