At RPM, we know that TIME continues to be one of the biggest obstacles to incorporating activism and philanthropy into your work. And while we can’t add more hours to your day—we can help maximize the time you do have.
Here are a few of RPM’s top tips and tricks for saving time and having a bigger impact. Some tips are specific to activism and philanthropy, and others are intended to make your day-to-day job easier so you have more time for all of the other work.
Be in touch if you have additional tips to add or if you want to talk to one of RPM’s staff members for as-needed strategic advice. We are here to help.
THE 2 EASIEST WAYS ANY ARTIST CAN HAVE A BIG IMPACT IN LESS THAN 5 MINUTES:
- Make Every Show a Benefit: By adding a micro-donation to every ticket sold on your tours, you can raise loads of money for the causes you care about. We can implement this for you! If every ticket sold to concerts in North America had a $1 add-on attached to it, we could raise $40 million every year.
- Encourage Fans to Go Green: Add a sentence about public transit and carpooling to all of your tour announcement pages. See here for sample language. If just 10% of the concert goers who normally drive didn’t because they took public transit or carpooled, we would save 35 million pounds of carbon from entering the atmosphere per year. (It would take 800,000 trees being planted every year to scrub that much carbon.)
Download our handbook for more on these and other ideas.
SAVE TIME
- Create a Charity Request Form: Customize these questions (and add canned email responses) to cut down on the amount of time you spend responding to requests from charities. The form also makes your decision-making more strategic! Here’s how to use to use it.
- Use your calendar to block out “to dos” in order to get your things done. This means that you actually schedule the task like a meeting onto your calendar. It ensures there is enough time in the day to do what you think you need to do. Plus it reserves time. More info on this can be found here.
- Work smarter not just harder: 21 time management tips to hack productivity.
- Make an anxiety list: Write down the 3-5 things—and no more—that are making you anxious or causing stress. Ask yourself if your day would be dramatically better if you got it done. Then spend 2 hours doing it. More here.
TRAVEL
- Get travel insurance. About $300/year but covers most things weather related, lost baggage, medical, etc. As travel becomes more challenging, this is a must have. (Especially because most plans cover any health care needs outside of a 100 mile radius from your home.)
- Organize your travel itineraries. Trip-it costs $49/year for individuals. Group plans exists as well. You can email any itinerary and it gets automatically organized, calendared (syncs with google), and also invites others to view your travels. It is well-organized, often notifies you via text before the airline when delays and cancellations are happening (and shows you other available travel options), etc.
- Save money with new cell phone plans for international travel—free texting, unlimited data, etc.
FINANCIAL
- Are you registered with SoundExchange?–The agency that collects digital royalties. Each year we comb the database of artists who have not collected their earnings and every year we find several dozen artists that we work with, who have not registered with them, and have money waiting for them. In one case, we found an artist who had tens of thousand dollars in royalties!! Another one to check is the Film Musicians Secondary Market Fund (FMSMF)—think SoundExchange but for film.
- Local Banks & National Touring: It’s not easy to use smaller banks when you tour. Here is a work-around that we’ve found works for some artists:
- Find a Credit Union that is part of the Credit Union Network so that you can make cash deposits at ATMs of others in the network when you tour. The downside of this is that you have to carry the cash between locations, and that you can’t easily deposit all of those pennies that people pay for merchandise with.
- Open a “deposit” account at a bigger bank, but only use it to accept the money and then transfer it to your local, small, homespun bank. You should choose the account that you have to have the lowest possible minimum balance and the lowest possible fees. Then just put the money in and have your business person get the money out asap. This means that the big bad bank doesn’t get to make money from your money.
OTHER FAVORITE RPM TIPS & RESOURCES:
- The Management Center: these folks specialize in helping nonprofits be more productive, but much of their advice could be used by anyone.
- Lifehacker: this website is full of helpful (and sometimes ridiculous) short cuts and life tricks.
The post Less Work + More Impact. Tips from RPM. appeared first on RPM.