Orchestras Canada

Fundraising special events are a boon; fundraising special events are a nightmare! Whatever your perspective, fundraising special events appear to be with us for the duration – and this week’s reading recommendations serve as wonderful guides to getting them right: introducing easy to use and commonsense approaches to evaluation, providing a comprehensive guide to their management, and providing inspiring examples of volunteer led projects that have won accolades from peers. We have recommended some of these resources before, but they’re so good, we’re not apologizing!

Here we go:

• From Charity Village’s Cynthia Armour CFRE, a short guide to special event evaluation;
• Courtesy of the Department of Canadian Heritage, Ken Wyman’s comprehensive yet highly entertaining guide to special event management;
• From the League of American Orchestras’ Volunteer Council, the ever-popular Gold Book On-Line, a comprehensive databank of award-winning volunteer-led projects.

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.

We’ve got a couple of recommendations for you this week:

The Canada Revenue Agency has just released the most recent issue of its reformatted Charities Connection electronic newsletter.  The current issue features articles on current activities at the Charities Directorate, and helpful advice for registered charities in Canada.  While it’s not exactly a page-turner, we believe it’s invaluable reading for all Canadian registered charities, and we commend it to you highly! You can read it here.

Thanks to a column by Cynthia J. Armour in the most recent issue of Charity Village‘s newsletter earlier this week, we were directed to a helpful, realistic, entertaining and informed guide to running fundraising special events.  And even though it was written in 1989, 98% of its content is as relevant today as it was then.  The resource, available as a free download, is the “Guide to Special Event Fundraising”, and it was written by fundraising guru Ken Wyman for the Voluntary Action Program at the Department of Canadian Heritage.  It covers the field, from ethical considerations to event design and management – and it even includes an “event ability quiz” where you can score your organization’s capacity to take on (and sustain) a special fundraising event. You can find this marvelous document here.

We’ve got two recommendations this week, both of which came to us courtesy of Charity Village’s weekly newsletter.  You too can subscribe by visiting here.

If you’ve ever considered establishing or joining a network to share materials, resources, space, and back-office functions in order to reduce costs and increase impact, you might be interested in a new report from the Calgary Chamber of Voluntary Organizations.  Entitled Sharing Services, Sharing Space, the report summarizes new research in this area.  You can download the report here.

Here’s something we strongly recommend that you bring to the attention of your auditor and the audit/finance committee of your board of directors:  accounting standards for not-for-profit organizations are proposed to change for annual financial statements relating to fiscal years beginning on or after January 1, 2012 – and the potential impact is significant.  Exposure drafts outlining proposed changes to accounting standards for not-for-profit organizations were released in early March, and you can find them here.

Philanthropy Journal, an American on-line newsletter, has recently released a series of tip sheets on working effectively with consultants, with papers on smart use of consultants, ups and downs of non-profit consulting, the steps needed in hiring a consultant, and – our favourite – “when do you need a fundraising consultant”? (That might be…now.)  You can find all of these under “Nonprofit Consulting 2009″ here.

Does your orchestra or organization have a policy on social media use?  With an ever-expanding group of Canadian orchestras getting into social media (via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others), they might be in order.  If you’re absent a policy or two, you might consider visiting here where you’ll find a large list of links to sample social media policy documents created by various organizations. Thanks to this week’s Charity Village newsletter, where we found this link.