Alternative Resources: Revenue Diversification in the Not-for-profit USA Symphony Orchestra

This article investigates revenue diversification in order to verify if it is advantageous for nonprofit creative entrepreneurs to improve their price and product marketing, fundraising, and other financing. The article also focuses on U.S. symphony orchestras that cope with Cost Disease (Baumol and Bowen 1965) thanks to the revenue diversification. Today these creative nonprofits are targeting several stakeholders and rent holders. In this article, they are clustered according to performances of their marketing, fundraising, and investing. As seen in 2008, U.S. symphony managers diversified and maximized total revenues of contributions, program service, interests, dividends, sales of assets, special fundraising events, etc. Thanks to the Ward cluster analysis (1963), two main profiles emerge: the Fundraiser and the Marketing Expert. The Marketing Expert is the most developed profile, but contributions are always exceeding program service revenues, and fundraising is more profitable than marketing.