Sustainability and AI were at the forefront this year at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Future of Museums Summit. What role will museums play in creating climate-friendly communities? And how can AI be used to maximize efficiency, increase accessibility, and deepen engagement? Read key conference takeaways from Xueer Ho and Dr. Brett Ashley Crawford.
An overemphasis on data-driven work within the nonprofit sector has been shown to result in cycles of disempowerment, driven by third-party data demands of funding bodies.. This compounds due to the many market orientations nonprofits need to adopt, particularly prevalent among the arts. A key to navigating these markets and funder requirements lies in identifying a specific data culture best fit for your organization and investing in resources and training in order to achieve that framework sustainably.
With AI’s ability to automatically produce content and process complicated datasets with high accuracy, museums worldwide are exploring ways in which this innovative technology can help them better achieve their missions and advance accessibility efforts. Through case studies, learn about three applications of this technology: content digitalization, language accessibility, and visual description.
October was filled with new debates on AI policies, a halt to one of the most significant AI safety bills in the United States, and a host of new AI developments in video, music, and even podcasts.
Arts and cultural nonprofits often operate in multiple markets for earned and contributed revenue. With increasing attention on data-driven decision making, effective market orientation often depends on effective data use. This fundamental collection, transmission, use, and interpretation of data within an organization collectively contributes to what can be considered an organization’s data culture.
To understand why arts organizations have struggled to capture funds from tech billionaires, arts managers and development professionals would do well to recognize what philanthropic sectors they are losing these dollars to, and why. Armed with these insights, arts professionals can then adjust their strategies to better appeal to this new and growing donor segment.
If you told the average San Francisco resident 40 years ago that the art scene in the Bay Area would be gasping for life in 2015, they probably would have laughed in your face. But it is 2015, and that is the reality we are facing. The tech giants have moved in, and tension is building between the Silicon Valley community and its non-profit entities. In particular, arts organizations seem to be at an extreme disadvantage for a few reasons:
Picture a producer preparing for the upcoming world premiere Contemporary Color, “a pep rally pop music mashup.” Conceived by David Byrne and commissioned by Luminato Festival and Brooklyn Academy of Music, Contemporary Color will bring together artists such as Nelly Furtado, St. Vincent, and Ira Glass, 350 performers, and a 15 piece band for its world-premiere performance in Toronto this summer. Not only are the artists, performers, and musicians all located in different cities across North America, great distances also separate the designers, technicians, and other producers. To coordinate the project across these distances, the producer relies on online collaborative tools to orchestrate the project from pre-production to post-production.
When talking about new media art, there is no single definition. According to a 2001 research study by the Rockefeller Foundation, media artworks can be defined according to nine common elements: fluidity, intangibility, liveness, variability, replicability, connectivity, interactivity, computability, and chance. New media art is a very general and broad category and includes many subcategories. Among these, net art, digital art and plurimedia art are the most common within the visual art field. Nevertheless, the meaning of new media is constantly evolving.
Google Analytics dashboards help users efficiently review important metrics and dimensions, like traffic sources or social media shares, quickly generate reporting tools, and create data-friendly cultures through easy sharing and visually storytelling. Learn about how dashboards can not only help managers process website information, but also how they can effectively communicate that information to a broader audience.
Throughout the process of selecting and implementing a grants management system (GMS), an arts organization must consider many factors in order to ensure positive results. These factors fall into four main categories: vendor interviews, data migration, integration, and training. All of equal importance, these categories must be weighed to find the optimum balance of system features and vendor characteristics.
Today we focus on the last two categories—integration and training. To read the first part of this two-part series, click here.
Throughout the process of selecting and implementing a grants management system (GMS), an arts organization must consider many factors in order to ensure positive results. These factors fall into four main categories: vendor interviews, data migration, integration, and training. All of equal importance, these categories must be weighed to find the optimum balance of system features and vendor characteristics.
Today we focus on the first two categories—vendor interviews and data migration.
When implementing new technology, such as a new CRM system, many organizations have learned the basics of how to select a product or vendor. But what about after the technology is selected? It can be overwhelming to consider the unpredictable changes that will occur among the flow or your organization’s work and even among its culture. However, by taking steps to manage the change, new technology can be integrated into an organization much more smoothly.
Today, an administrator has the ability to manage the entire granting lifecycle through a grants management system (GMS), including applicant relations, panelist reviews, and fund distributions. Online storage available through cloud computing and software with fewer hardware requirements have increased GMS product capabilities. And the ability for a GMS to interact with other systems, such as payment portals and accounting systems, has further made management of the grant lifecycle within a GMS easier. For many of today’s grant-making organizations, GMS software is an essential tool in day-to-day activities.
One of the too-many-hats I wear is that of historian. We can learn so much about the future if we look back (short-term or long-term) and reflect. Trite but true, we are our history. So listening to MIT's Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte's Ted Talk was a unique happy moment, as he eloquently reveals how predicting the future comes out of an extension of knowledge of the past.
