Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

In his blog ( CSR Now! , highly recommended) Tim McClimon, President of the American Express Foundation, recently devoted a couple of entries to re-capping an interview he did with Reynold Levy, whose book They Told Me Not to Take That Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center , recently came out. Tim worked at the AT&T Foundation during the time that Levy was president there, before assuming the presidency of Lincoln Center. Tim recaps some of the 25 leadership lessons that Levy lays out in his book. I thought it would be valuable, given the commitment of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation to leadership (a focus we have in common with the American Express Foundation ), to share some of these by excerpting from Tim’s blog. If you want more visit Tim’s blog, or better yet, buy and read Levy’s book ! I think his advice resonates – perhaps because it mostly mirrors what I have learned in my career. (It's always gratifying, I suppose, to have ...

Recently the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation completed a comprehensive assessment of our programs and operations, and one of the key findings was that we had not adequately told the story - or stories - of our good work and the work of our grantees. The need for more robust and effective communications was made more acute by the relatively recent decision to focus our grantmaking on arts and culture, and nonprofit leadership. We began working with Launch Advertising - which had done similar work for the Denver Foundation - to assess our existing communications assets, strengths and weaknesses. This led to several months of deep work clarifying to whom we wanted to communicate with, to what end, with what messages, and how. We have developed a new web site , a refreshed logo, and will be rolling out an e-newsletter, and more aggressive use of social media. (Interestingly, after lots of experimentation, our new logo is exactly the same as the old logo - same typeface, but with a dif...