Last month, I was invited to present for the Texas Commission on the Arts’ (TCA) Professional Development Webinar Series a talk about how to best use technologies that are available today. This talk stemmed from a grant Glasstire received from the Houston Endowment that allowed our organization to examine how we could effectively maximize our use of various softwares and programs to save time and function better as an organization.
This two-year grant, which we recently completed, allowed us to look at the bare bones foundation of Glasstire and to research systems for things we desperately needed. Document and staff management software, donor databases, password managers, and website upgrades were just a few of the technologies that we had put off implementing in favor of a more piecemeal way of operating.
Helmed first by our founding (former) Publisher Rainey Knudson and then by me, the process we undertook can serve as a model for other organizations on how to implement a best-practices way of operating to capture staff and institutional knowledge. We also realized throughout our work that many of the technologies and systems we adopted would be beneficial to small-business owners, artists, and various other creative individuals who regularly manage multiple projects at once.
Also through this grant, we discovered that financial barriers to the implementation of some of these technologies are not so intimidating, and that their benefits far outweigh their costs. Furthermore, some of the available technologies can be shared by individuals, offsetting the sticker price.
To see my full presentation from the TCA’s webinar, and to lear more about Glasstire’s findings through this Houston Endowment grant, please watch the video above.
