Tag Archives: donors

Link Roundup – 11/6/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Photograph: Mark Douet

The Guardian has an article asking organizations to consider how they impact the local communities that don’t necessarily see their work:

Every theatregoer has an example of a play that changed their life to a greater or lesser extent. However, the real question I reckon theatres need to ask themselves is not whether what they do impacts on those who go to their shows but whether what goes on in their building really has a significant impact for those who have never stepped inside it? This is not about an individual’s response and relationship to a particular show in a particular building, but about a play and a venue’s relationship to the community at large.

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The LA Times has a story summing up the recent stats surrounding theatre donors and attendance:

Theaters are making adjustments by trying new approaches, she said, including more emphasis on shows geared toward children and parents.

The report said that productions for young audiences were “a bright spot” in which attendance grew 12.9% between 2010 and 2014. But childrens’ series accounted for just 3% of total attendance at the 118 theaters surveyed over the five years.

“More theaters would benefit from producing high-quality programming for multigenerational audiences,” Eyring said. “Not only because the numbers tend to be on the rise, but it’s a way of engaging the next generation of theatergoers.”

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Link Roundup! – 8/14/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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The Nonprofit with Balls blog has a post on what he calls “The Nonprofit Hunger Games”:

We become biased toward those who survive: In the Hunger Games, the youngest kids, the sweetest, kindest ones, are usually the first to get killed. Everyone bets against them. In the Nonprofit Hunger Games, funders bet on which nonprofits are the most “sustainable” and invest in those organizations. Instead of holistically looking at problems and systems, society just funds those organizations we think will be strongest and most likely to survive. And since we fund these more “sustainable” organizations, then of course these organizations are likelier to survive, while the smaller, “weaker” organizations (often led by marginalized communities) are left to struggle. We start to believe that those organizations that survive deserve it, that those who fail also deserve it. But simply because a nonprofit is good at surviving, it does not necessarily mean that it is most effective at solving community problems.

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Phil Weaver-Stoesz’s essay on HowlRound about delegating tasks has some great reminders for us busy theatre folks:

As artists, we are trained to be recklessly optimistic about how much we can handle. We’re fast learners, we love our art, and we have something big to say, so what can go wrong? We approach the world with laptops in hand, ready to create. The problem is, we burn out. We enter the process full of passion, but halfway through we peeter out in a train wreck of procrastination, fear and self-doubt. I call it, the “Puppydog Black Hole” problem.

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Link Roundup! – 4/24/15

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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The ARTery has details on a report released last week by the city’s office of Diversity, calling for new strategies to diversify the city’s workforce after uncovering some sobering statistics about how gender and race are represented in Boston:

Overall, the report finds the city’s workforce is predominantly white (58 percent) and does not reflect Boston’s diverse population. Hispanics make up 18 percent of the city’s population, but only 11 percent of the city’s workforce while Asians make up 9 percent of the city’s population, but only 4 percent of the city’s workforce, according to the report. However, blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population and 26 percent of the city’s workforce, according to the report.

But, when it comes to leadership positions (department heads) all minority groups are very much underrepresented, the report found — 74 percent are white, 18 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 3 percent are Asian.

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In his post on the Butts in Seats blog, Joe Patti looks at the Quartz post breaking down the recent Pew Research study stating that kids from different economic backgrounds use social media differently. There are some interesting takeaways for organizations looking to reach young and economically diverse audiences online:

Income and race also often determine whether someone has access to a desktop or tablet computer. In any case, it seems increasingly important to make sure your website design is mobile friendly (h/t Drew McManus) if you want teens to have positive interactions with it as that is increasingly the platform of choice.

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