Know Your Own Bone – Nonprofit Marketing & Online Engagement

The original header when I started KYOB in 2009

I began this blog one year ago and it’s come a long, long way in the last twelve months! Throughout the last year, this has been a place for me to share ideas, gather my thoughts, and even do a bit of research. In one short year, Know Your Own Bone won me an award, earned me phone conversations and guidance from Penelope Trunk, got articles re-printed in popular magazines, hooked me up with the Nonprofit Millennial Bloggers Alliance, gave me the opportunity to write an advance review for the Harvard Business Review, was picked up by wonderful thought leaders, and allowed me to connect with many talented professionals.

Upcoming: Speaking of connecting with talented professionals, please tune in to Rosetta Thurman‘s BlogTalkRadio show, All Nonprofits Considered, from 12 – 1pm EST next Monday, July 12th. I will be discussing the current culture of nonprofit leadership in museums and the arts with young arts professional, Ian David Moss. Please join the chat room and help contribute to the discussion next Monday!

I know many bloggers often feature “best of” posts that link back to previously written articles. Until this point, I’ve never done this in a post. In celebration of my one-year anniversary with Know Your Own Bone, I’ll highlight some of the various types of posts I’ve written. These are certainly not “best of” posts, just a little survey of the themes I’ve covered over the last twelve months. Create a page with all of Know Your Own Bone’s “best of”s, you suggest? That sounds like a great task for year #2.

• The first post: 3 Important Lessons I Learned From My First Full-Time Nonprofit/Museum Job

• The one that gets re-printed most often: 10 Reasons to Visit a Museum

• The one that gets the most Google juice: Where Are Museum Studies Graduate Programs Going Wrong?

• The one that earned me the honor of Brazen Careerist’s Blogger of the Year 2009: Why I Don’t Regret Leaving My Job During an Economic Recession

• The one where I play devil’s advocate: The Raise of The Starry-Eyed Entrepreneur

• If I ever went on to get a PhD, I’d want it to be related to these kinds of ideas: A Theory For Breaking Through Nonprofit Sector Constraints

• A truth that I believe will play a role in the future in a big way: Social Change is Sector Agnostic- and Gen Yers Know it.

• The ones where I call out what I think are silly nonprofit practices/beliefs: (1) The Nonprofit Leadership Deficient Won’t be as Bad as We Think (2) Jeffrey Deitch and the Management-Trained Museum Director (3) A Good Nonprofit Leader is Worth a Million Bucks

• One of my personal favorites: 5 Reasons Why I Chose to Pursue an MPA over an MBA

• The one where I take the liberty of speaking for my generation: The Nonprofit Manifesto For Generation Y Leaders

• The three that were downright fun to write: (1) Discover Your Public Service Identity, (2) 8 Movies With Great Museum Scenes, (3) 55 Low-Resource Ways for Museums to Connect with the Community

• The ones in which I got to read cool scientific studies: (1) How to Lead with Empathy: Read Fiction, (2) When Art Museum Directors Talk Trash, Everybody Wins (3) 5 Reasons to be Proud That You Majored in English

• The one in which my personal finances spilled out into the blog: 5 Unexpected Ways in Which Grad School Loans Are Changing my Lifestyle

• The one that took a few days to write, but I thought was cool: Sizing up the Graduate Degrees of 17 Top Museum Directors

• The personal one about my favorite holiday: Keep The Ride Alive- A Tradition to Celebrate the Power of the Individual

Thanks to all of you who check-in on Know Your Own Bone again and again- especially those of you who subscribe or who have reached out and commented or shot an e-mail or two my way. I love hearing from you all and I am beyond grateful to have such a great group of intelligent and insightful readers!

Here’s to the start of another year of Know Your Own Bone, with even more thoughts on the evolution of museums and nonprofits, community engagement, and social change. Cheers!