Business Models (and other considerations) from the Arts World

The Artful Manager is a terrific blog that "...seeks a new set of metaphors for the administrative leaders of arts and culture. There is a need for business thinking, to be sure, with an intensity and deftness we have only begun to understand. But there is also an energy beyond money and markets that the artful manager must channel. What if, in the end, the arts organization is not a problem to be managed, but an instrument to be played?"

Recognizing the special challenges to sustainability faced by nonprofit arts organizaitons, one recent entry focuses on an intriguing idea for  blending nonprofit and for-profit models: 

Matthew Richter is fed up with the nonprofit corporate model, and isn't going to take it any more (in an excerpt from a longer work on the subject). He suggests that the time has come for a more market-forces-friendly structure that will bring back profit motive and equity ownership to social-sector challenges...He suggests a line-item nonprofit model, where a for-profit company can request a charitable tax status for specific activities that serve the public good (a nightclub could run a performance art program; Amazon.com could run a literacy and free book initiative). The primary drive of these organizations would remain profit and ownership and self-interest...but the social and public interests of the owners would have a new way to sustain themselves.

Susan Herr