We’ve got three recommendations this week – and a plea! We’ll start with the plea.

We would love to feature recommendations from our readers in this section of our newsletter. If you’ve encountered a website, blog, article, book, magazine (or whatever!) that you think other orchestra people from across the country would find pertinent and insightful – in either official language – write us a short paragraph about it, and we’ll feature it (with credit) in an upcoming issue of Orchestra News.

And on to this week’s recommendations:

1. The folks at Technology in the Arts have posted a pair of articles on the use of social media to engage “older” audience members. With the most significant growth in social media use (a whopping 100% increase from 2009 to 2010) coming in the 65+ demographic, it’s a timely discussion. You can follow it, here.

2. Charity Village turned us on to an interesting blog devoted to hot topics in arts marketing, entitled Arts Marketing Resources. We were particularly taken with the beginners’ guide to website analytics, posted in June. You can find the blog, here.

3. Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA), a US-based organization of private and public funders, is currently holding a discussion on the ways that they might individually and collectively work to address some long standing challenges that arts organizations face because of their capitalization structure. GIA has published an interesting and thoughtful report on the challenges and opportunities – and it’s well worth reading for anyone who has pondered the reasons why things feel the way they do. You can find it here.