Charity Looks to Its Start-Up Days for ‘Cowboy’ Spirit

Fractured Arts, SEPT Innovations

In its early days, Fractured Atlas was scrappy and tried new ideas out of necessity. But as the nonprofit organization — which uses technology to help artists manage the business side of their work — grew and programs became more specialized, its founder worried about losing that culture of experimentation.

So three and a half years ago, Fractured Atlas started a research-and-development pipeline to lay out the process for pursuing new projects and encouraging employees to propose bold new ideas.

“We saw an opportunity to take the kind of cowboy spirit that had pervaded the organization for its first decade of existence and think about what that looks like in a mature organization,” says Adam Huttler, founder and executive director of Fractured Atlas.

So far, nine ideas have entered the pipeline. Two have developed into new services: Artful.ly, web-based software that helps artists manage ticket sales, donations, and contacts, and SpaceFinder, an online service that connects artists with available rental spaces.

Nonprofits, often stretched for staff, money, and time, struggle to build innovation into their schedules. And until recently, innovation programs at arts groups have been rare, says Richard Evans, president of EmcArts, a consulting company in New York.

Traditionally, he says, cultural groups have applied their creativity to the art they produce, not to organizational problems. But that mind-set is starting to change, leading more groups to institute a process for nurturing new ideas.

“They’re realizing that innovation isn’t just about the occasional product,” says Mr. Evans. “It’s not just about the light bulb and the best, brightest new idea. It’s actually a continuous process of questioning and prototyping.”

One of the biggest benefits of Fractured Atlas’s program is that it has given staff members a shared way of discussing their ideas and what’s involved in bringing them to fruition , says Mr. Huttler.

“It allows us to talk about the different stages of development of a new project or a new program.”

The pipeline has seen at least one failure. A project that combined arts data with information from the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Census, and Bureau of Labor Statistics to map arts activity in different geographic regions was well into the scaling phase when Fractured Atlas canceled it. Several groups still use the underlying software, but Fractured Atlas no longer promotes the product.

The experience drove home an important lesson: The cost of pulling the plug on a project, measured in terms of money, mission, and reputation, increases further along in the process.

It took two years for the nonprofit’s employees to join Mr. Huttler in submitting ideas into the pipeline for possible development.

The charity’s founder thinks his colleagues may have held back because of concerns about taking on additional work. But he also thinks that until staff members saw one of their peers start the process, many of them didn’t feel like they had permission to propose new endeavors.

“Until there was an example to the contrary, there was the sense that, ‘Oh, Adam’s the guy who comes up with new ideas for the pipeline, and other people may be brought in to advise on it or help manage it, but this is Adam’s pipeline,’ ” he says.

The idea that broke the logjam is the Make Time Clock (above), which helps artists carve out time for their creative projects. A Kickstarter campaign to fund production of the Make Time Clock raised almost $44,000, far surpassing its goal of $25,000. The first clocks will go out this summer.

Employees have submitted two other ideas for the research-and- development pipeline since Chap Ambrose, a user-experience engineer at Fractured Atlas, proposed the clock idea.

The innovation program, says Mr. Huttler, does a good job of balancing what can be conflicting values: experimentation and order.

“We’ve been able to build an infrastructure and processes that allow anybody to have new ideas and get them tried out,” he says. “But we’ve got a way of doing that where it’s not just people running amok.”