After years of practical, no-nonsense content built specifically for arts administrators, ArtsHacker is officially moving into archive status.

The site will remain fully accessible. Every article, every tutorial, every workflow breakdown: it all stays up. Nothing disappears. You can still search it, link to it, share it, and use it. It simply will not receive new content going forward.

Closing something you built is not failure. It is not giving up. It is recognizing that the work did what it was supposed to do, and having the courage to say so out loud instead of letting it quietly fade.

ArtsHacker deserves better than a quiet fade. The reality is that this chapter is complete, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice to everyone who contributed to it.

The Contributors Who Made It Real

ArtsHacker would not have been what it was without the contributors who showed up consistently, wrote with authority, and treated the readers with empathy-driven expertise.

To every contributor who published here over the years: thank you. You gave your time and expertise to a professional community that needed it, and that work has lasting value.

Two contributors deserve specific recognition:

Joe Patti was a fixture on this site. His writing brought a thoughtful, grounded perspective rooted in years of real arts administration experience. Joe understood that the challenges facing arts organizations were rarely just operational; they were human, structural, and strategic. His articles reflected that depth.

Eric Joseph Rubio brought a practitioner’s rigor to every piece he wrote. His willingness to dig into the mechanics of finance and explain them without condescension made him exactly the kind of contributor ArtsHacker was built around.

Ceci Dadisman brought something this site genuinely needed: the ability to translate fast-moving digital marketing trends into language arts administrators could actually use on Monday morning. Her focus on email, social media, accessibility, and plain language was never academic. It was practitioner-to-practitioner, and it showed in every piece she wrote.

Both of them made this site better. Significantly better.

Why Now

The world that made ArtsHacker necessary has changed.

Not because arts administrators no longer need support, but because the kind of support this site offered, specific, practical, process-level guidance, is now something a practitioner can find through AI tools without waiting for someone to write an article about it.

The really fascinating part is that this includes workflows as specialized as arts and culture administration.

ArtsHacker was built for a moment when none of this was true. But that moment has passed. The work was never been about the site. It was about providing arts admins with what they need, when they need it.

 The Archive Stays Open

Nothing here disappears. That matters, because the work that went into this site was not disposable content produced on a schedule. It was practitioners sharing hard-won knowledge with peers who needed it. That kind of generosity deserves a permanent home, not a 404 page.

This community never needed to be convinced that arts administration was serious work. You already knew. You treated this work like it mattered, so thank you for proving it every time you showed up.

In March, Arts MidWest sponsored a webinar on the Trump Administration’s Executive Orders on DEI.

The webinar was led by attorneys from McDermott Will & Emery LLP. Lawyers were eligible to get seminar credit for participating in the webinar so the language may feel a little technical at times. However, it may prove reliable as legal advice. There was no disclaimer encouraging people to consult a lawyer.

But given that the contributors to ArtsHacker are not lawyers, we encourage you to consult a lawyer. Perhaps even include them in the viewing of this webinar. Especially since the legal landscape may have changed since March 19 when the webinar was broadcast.  Some of the litigation and suspension orders they discuss may have been resolved.

Among the top issues to be aware of is that federal agencies have been instructed to pursue cases of unlawful DEI policies among large foundations and commercial and non-profit entities. These efforts may be shifted to smaller organizations at any point.

However, not all DEI focused policies are necessarily illegal. Here is a brief index of some topic points in the webinar.

At ~8:15 in the video, they start to discuss the civil and criminal False Claims penalties for certification that you meet requirements and criteria in contracts and grant agreements. Some certification requirements on National Endowment for the Arts grants are on hold pending litigation. Pay attention to all grant requirements, regardless of source since many entities are distributing federal funds through their programs and will likely have these certification requirements.

At ~14:30 they point out there are no prohibitions on educational/historical/cultural observations like Black History Month provided no one’s participation is excluded.

At ~21:00 they start to discuss legal vs. illegal DEI programs.  This is obviously an important section to watch closely. It covers criteria tethered to race or gender; what constitutes quota setting; having affinity or employee resource groups and scrutiny on whether some are provided more resources and benefits than others.

They provide a summary of how the greater market is redesigning policies to move away from DEI while still trying to maintain a commitment to breaking down barriers.

At ~38:00 They make suggestions about where to focus efforts and policies to enact.

At ~53:00 They address the question of organizations focused on serving very specific groups identified by race, nationality, gender, etc.

A number of arts organizations are embracing employees’ desire to work from home on either a full or hybrid basis. Making the switch to this sort of work environment, even for some employees, can impact the organizational culture and requires a change in expectations among co-workers.

Arts Midwest recently provided some tips for Asynchronous Work and Project Management on their website which can help create the structure and expectations for these types of work arrangements.  They provide a couple templates that can be used to create and evaluate plans for both one-time projects and ongoing work arrangements.

The first tip is to create a team charter that acts as a living document that addresses

“… the sometimes-unspoken expectations and boundaries of a team’s practices and processes. A team charter helps remove assumptions and replaces them with clarity and intentional guidance, which is integral to building trust and successful asynchronous work.”

The second tip is to create a project brief which includes many of the details surrounding the project. Ellen Mueller, the author of the Arts Midwest piece, lists about a dozen different elements which may or may not appear in the brief including a summary of the project, objectives, budget, stakeholders, links to files, project timeline, etc.

The third tip is to have some process by which different teams members can share status updates between meetings. Since people will be working somewhat out of phase with other team members, it is helpful for each to have a way to see where things stand as they start or continue their work period for the day. As Mueller notes, a robust update sharing process can shorten meetings by eliminating the need to recite what each member has been up to.

The last tip is to conduct an evaluation/retrospective on the process in order to improve the experience for the team moving forward. It is an opportunity to talk about what happened, how to communicate and deliver content and information in a way that best suits each team member, identify areas of (in)efficiency, propose tools that may facilitate the process in the future, etc.

Some of the tips provided may feel overly structured for the informal work environment of arts and cultural organizations, but there are likely some situations in which a strong framework is useful. It is easier to discard what isn’t useful than to try to fabricate guidelines whole cloth.  

On the other hand, if it feels like things are being accomplished, but in a very much seat of your pants manner, implementing a structure can be helpful. It may feel like you have artificially imposed constraints on the work environment, but once people are able to internalize the process and begin to employ an effective shared shorthand the boundaries may dissolve into the background.

Happy New Year! With the busy holiday concert period closed, it’s time to take care of some important start-of-year administrative tasks. Here are four such tasks to consider tackling within the first couple of weeks of the new year.

Issue Form 1099 to Vendors

If you paid any of your performers, consultants, or other non-employees at least $600 during the last calendar year, you will need to issue a Form 1099 by January 31 of the new year. The IRS website has complete details and instructions. For practical purposes, it might be worth sending Forms 1099 to all your non-employee vendors. Two important notes:

1. If you only accrued, but did not pay, a particular vendor fee in the last calendar year, you don’t need to send a Form 1099 until next January. For example, if you had a fundraising consultant do an ad-hoc project in late December to help with your year-end appeal, but the consultant didn’t send the invoice until January (even if the invoice was dated in December), the date of the payment is what matters for 1099 purposes.
2. If you only paid a particular vendor by credit card, their payment processor will send them what they need for tax purposes (a 1099-K, which your organization itself might receive from, e.g., PayPal if you take payments through that platform) – this is why you wouldn’t send a Form 1099 to any hotel, airline, or office supply store where you only made credit card purchases.

Update Your Form W9

Some of your payors (particularly government agencies that make grants) might ask for a copy of your Form W9 with each annual grant award, and ask for a copy signed and dated within the last year. Proactively sign and date a fresh copy of a Form W9 and put it in a central file repository.

Check the Mileage Reimbursement Rate

The IRS generally updates this rate each year based on a variety of factors and posts the information online. If you have any employee reimbursement templates or similar tools that have this value pre-loaded, take a moment in January to update.

Update Footers with Current Year

The footer of your website, your Mailchimp emails, and similar shouldn’t still say © 2024 once it’s January of 2025! Check all these digital platforms and update accordingly.

In December 2022, ArtsHacker published a guide to three small business travel rewards programs. Two of these three programs (the two airline programs) have had significant changes to the point where the programs we wrote about in 2022 no longer exist, and the two airlines have entirely new programs in their place. Here we provide information about the current programs, and revisit one useful hotel program.

If you ever have employees or artists traveling to or from your organization’s home city, your organization should be earning small business travel rewards whenever possible. Many hotel chains and airlines have rewards programs specifically for business entities that are separate from the loyalty and rewards programs for the individual traveler. The good news is that both the traveler and the business or organization that pays for the travel can earn rewards in the separate programs on the same flight or hotel stay.

These programs are built for organizations that have regular travelers on individual or small party reservations. Think a small group of employees going to the annual Chorus America or League of American Orchestras conference, or an opera company that brings a handful of soloists to town for specific productions a few times a year. They do not provide incremental value for large reservations such as for an orchestra tour, and often are not eligible for earning on these larger corporate or group bookings anyway.

Here are two airline small business programs and one hotel small business program worth a look for an arts organization. All are free to join and again, participation does not preclude the individual traveler on the reservation from earning their own miles/points, or enjoying the perks of individually-earned status in the individual consumer loyalty program.

American Airlines AAdvantage Business

American Airlines used to have the Business Extra program, but at the beginning of 2024 retired that program and launched the new AAdvantage Business program. A key change is that earnings and redemptions are now the same mileage and loyalty currencies as in the consumer/person AAdvantage program. Miles earned by the business through the program can be redeemed directly for flights or transferred to employee’s personal American Airlines accounts. Travelers themselves earn additional credit toward American Airlines status levels when their tickets are associated with a business program account. There are also some additional perks for holders of American Airlines’ cobranded credit cards, and different tools for managing employee travel (e.g., deploying company payment methods). Enrollment is free.

In this writer’s opinion and experience, the new program is less attractive than its predecessor. But, it still might hold value depending on your organization’s air travel needs and patterns.

Delta Air Lines SkyMiles for Business

Delta Air Lines used to have the SkyBonus program, but near the end of 2023 retired that program and launched the new SkyMiles for Business program. The business program still has separate earnings from the personal/consumer SkyMiles program, and still has a variety of redemption options including Delta eGift Cards. The new program offers additional travel management tools to all participants. Enrollment is free, though there are minimum spend requirements for certain perks.

In this writer’s opinion and experience, the new program is no net change from its predecessor once all the changes are compared. Take a look and see if it would provide value based on your organization’s air travel needs and patterns.

Hyatt Leverage

On the hotel side is the Hyatt Leverage program, and there are no changes since we wrote about it previously. This isn’t so much a rewards program as it is a discount program, but that makes it quite simple. Upon enrolling, the business/organization will be issued a corporate code. Use this code in the Special Rates filed when making a reservation to return discounted rates as available. The terms state that discounts can be up to 15%. The program also comes with a simple dashboard where the account manager can track spending and stays. To stay in the program, the account must accrue 50 room nights per year. The terms also explicitly allow for employees to use the corporate discounts on their personal travel (it doesn’t matter who pays for the stays).