Guest Authors

Keeping Your Books Audit Ready

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For arts managers outside the finance team, the idea of an audit may seem either terrifying or mundane. Even some inside the finance teams, of organizations of all sizes, the annual external audit process can consume a significant portion of staff time and mental energy for several months of the year. The external audit process results in a document known as the audited financial statements, which provides a professional opinion that the organization’s accounting records are clear of misstatement. Institutional funders, charity watchdog agencies, and other entities look to this document for … Read more

How To Make Concert Programs The Right Way

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If you’ve been in a position of having to create a concert program, or have them emailed from colleagues and collaborators, you know there are lots of ways to deal with positioning composers and titles. In this tutorial, I’m going to talk about the right way, using the tools that are built-in for exactly this purpose, that will make your programs look great and keep them easy to maintain: tab stops. Instead of entering the perfect number of spaces and tabs between titles and composers, you only need one tab, and let … Read more

Bridge the Board And Management With A Working Committee Structure

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“I just love board meetings!” said no arts (or any other kind of) manager ever. While I can’t promise you will actually start to say that, I can offer a model that I’ve seen work well in my own organization following its recent adoption. This model will make your governance structure more useful and palatable to all involved. In centers on the presence of a robust committee structure sitting in the space between the board of directors and the management. Deciding to Use Committees A nonprofit board has governance and oversight responsibilities, … Read more