One of the great things about the community design process is that you get to tell the project exactly what it needs to do in order to serve you best. One thing I heard clearly at the workshop is that it will be particularly important for ArtsReady to understand clearly what its various stakeholders need, and provide for those needs effectively.
There was a consensus that the ArtsReady services needed to be "nearly free" to individual arts organizations, where "nearly free" means, not just low or no cost, but absolutely minimal effort to create a readiness plan and keep it current. To do that, other organizations, such as arts service organizations, must be prepared to help defray costs. For such organizations to be willing, it will be necessary for ArtsReady to serve their needs as well.
Providing essential, well-crafted services for such a diverse group of stakeholders is a real challenge, but not an impossible one: every other community design project has faced the same challenges, and so far all of them have found effective paths.
In order to find such a path for ArtsReady, it is imperative that the project understand deeply the needs of all of the stakeholders. To that end, I want to ask participants (and anyone else in the arts community who reads this and has a point of view they'd like to share) to write a comment to this post that will help the project team to see the world from your point of view. What is it that your organization would need from ArtsReady, in order to make it worthwhile for you to support it financially on an ongoing basis? What do you think that other organizations like yours would need? If you are a service organization, what client needs should the project serve, and what needs does it need to serve for your service org?
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I asked the question, so I'll kick off the answers. I can't speak for my Foundation or my colleagues in any official way, but having been a funder for a few years now, I can offer my personal view of what projects like AR need to provide. I would urge other funders who read this to share their own views. Whether you agree or disagree with what I say, your opinion will add value.
ReplyDelete(And of course, I would urge everyone else who reads this to share your views, too--the project needs to hear from as diverse a group of potential stakeholders as possible.)
Funders have different missions, so we each tend to look for distinctive features in a project. Still, some of our more universal concerns are: Does it help the grantee to pursue its mission more effectively? Does it achieve my own program objectives? Does it generate a significant social return-on-investment? Is there a reasonable chance that the grant will actually accomplish what it promises?
Anything that helps funders consistently to improve the outcomes of funding while minimizing the risks will tend to be viewed very favorably. Thus, most funders now routinely require financial statements from arts organizations they are considering funding--experience having taught them that a lack of financial capacity or financial mismanagement is likely to reduce the chances of a successful outcome for their grant.
It may be possible for ArtsReady to make a similar case to funders about the importance of readiness plans, so that funders start looking for such plans in the same way that they now look for financials. To do so, AR will have to show: (a) that readiness planning is effective in increasing the likelihood that arts organizations will survive to continue their missions and carry out their grant responsibilities; (b) that the benefits to the grantee of creating these plans outweigh the costs; and (c) that the ArtsReady project has a sustainability model robust enough that a funder can feel safe in pointing its grantees to the project for readiness planning services. In addition, if it wants funders to pay for, rather than just require, its services, AR will need to make the case that this is a legitimate burden for funders to absorb for their grantees. (Of course, the project will also have to make the case that it is a maximally efficient provider of such services, as compared to other alternatives.)
The most powerful argument in favor of direct support by the funder, in my view, is that it is more efficient and/or effective to provide coverage directly as a benefit to grantees, rather than to rely on individual grantees to comply and thereby tempt them to avoid the costs. That's particularly true in readiness, because every organization benefits more when every other organization around it also has a readiness plan. But other benefits are also possible; for instance, the Cultural Data Project provides its reports to funders in a standardized form that substantially eases the burden of reading and analyzing them. That's a real benefit for a funder who makes a lot of grants.
Those are the minimal requirements from a funder's perspective, I think. It may be possible to identify other features or benefits that would make AR even more attractive to particular funders; for instance, public funders may generate benefits for their other external stakeholders by supporting preparedness in their jurisdictions, and may even find new ways to pursue their missions through the services and information that AR could provide. But that's not my arena, so I'll leave it to other funders from other types of funding organizations to articulate those ideas further.
That's my take on the job that a private funder might be willing to hire ArtsReady to do. What job(s) would *your* organization be willing to hire AR for?