As Kate Larsen so brilliantly puts it, a strategic planning session is not the same thing as a strategic plan session.
I’ve contributed to them. I’ve written them. I’ve defended them. And more than once, I’ve been burned by them. But still, it’s always the first thing every board chair tells every consultant that their company really needs one.
A strategic plan.
Luckily for you, things have progressed so poorly on the nonprofit arts front — moving away from the real reason your charity exists in the first place is never a good strategy — that you may have postponed the full-tilt swan dive into the 1970s version of a solution: craft a strategic plan.
I love listening to Kate Larsen. You should, too, even if you’re not in Australia, where she reigns supreme as the clearest thinking arts leader on the continent. (She co-authored a fantastic book last year: The Relationship is the Project. And while it’s Australia-oriented, the lessons apply in the US in a big way.) On July 18, she posted a rant (well, to her it was a rant, anyway) about arts organizations being so focused on creating a strategic plan that they’ve forgotten to embark on strategic planning. The former is a document, which might be a nice thing if all your charitable, financial, and personnel ducks are in a row.
That’s, like, 2% of you.
For the remaining 98%, forget about the strategic plan. Especially here in the US, where arts organizational leaders confuse support for the arts as a thing only achieved when someone sends money to their own organization (the rest be damned, to some extent), using your precious time, money, and resources to hire every consultant on the block to write an unsupported document of additional timelines, structure, and overworked-staff-driven new activities which achieve basically nothing but lost time, money, and resources. And burned-out personnel. And fewer in the industry who can do the jobs for which they were hired in the first place. Watch this YouTube video, or go directly to her website and watch it there via Insta: https://bit.ly/410NENg.
As always, Kate is kinder than I, although she’s often more exasperated than all of us put together. If you don’t bother to listen/watch this video, at least read this lengthy (only slightly edited) passage, which asks the real questions about how you want to proceed with your company.
Do you have time to make … an updated strategic plan with a clear multiyear focus on recovery and survival [that] is likely to be sufficient? Or are one or more of the threats that you’re facing creating real and immediate issues right now — be that from rising inflation impacting your box office or other end income, the hugely reduced likelihood of receiving public or philanthropic grants in our never more competitive funding landscape, or the fact that we’re just still deep in a Cultural workforce crisis in which people are burning out, leaving the sector and not being replaced, which is making succession planning and delivery harder than most of us can remember — in which case it probably doesn’t make sense to waste time polishing your org’s strategic statements, when that time could be much better spent making immediate, impactful and yes, possibly big and scary decisions.
But better that than as we’ve seen too many examples of recently, boards and organizations being too focused on process or hoping things will improve, and then running out of money and of time, which leads to [this question]: … How much is up for grabs? How open and vulnerable is your organization willing to be, including whether or not you’re up for asking whether your org is still needed in the first place? How do you know whether it’s still best place to deliver on its purpose? [Are you] open to doing less now in order to do more long term?
If you’re not willing to put it all out on the table or to ask your stakeholders how they think you’re going or what they actually need, you may have fallen into the trap of spinning the wheels of self-perpetuation over and above fulfilling. The purpose that your organization was set up to meet in the first place, in which case, taking either a strategic plan or a strategic planning model has the potential to waste everybody’s time.
Ours is a for purpose sector. Ours is the sector of meaning and impact and care. So when we are brave enough to have big conversations, those conversations and decisions — however scary — will benefit us all.
Because I’ve been threatened to be cut off unless I provide a weird analogy to all of this, I am required to add this next paragraph regarding this subject.
I don’t care how sweet, how light, how creamy, and how orgasmically delicious your showstopper croquembouche may be if my car is on fire.
Similarly, I don’t care how excellent, how divine, how talent-filled, and how orgasmically inspiring your art is if your nonprofit arts organizations doesn’t provide some charitable impact to your community, a community that’s begging for help. And neither do all the other funders.
After all this time, I have to tell you this? Crikey. Maybe you really should give Kate a call.
In the meantime, in case you missed the announcement two weeks ago:
In early 2024, we laid out the problem and gave you a path.
In late 2024, we gave you discussion prompts and rules to help you figure out the answers on your own.
And now, in late 2025, we show you that not only can success happen when you choose to focus on your community before you decide to focus on the art, but it has happened. It’s happening at other organizations right now, despite everything coming out of Washington, DC.
On December 1, Changemakers Books will be publishing my third and last book on the subject of using your arts organization as a tool of charity (rather than as a tool to benefit your own donors). In SCENE CHANGE 3: THE ONES WHO GET IT, you’ll discover that there are, in fact, nonprofit arts organizations in America that fulfill their nonprofit charter by centering their community’s needs over their own. In this book, you’ll discover nonprofit arts organizations that have saved people’s lives.
Literally. As in, some people would be dead without their intervention.
In this process, I studied organizations for about a year and embedded with two, each for about a month. I went to work with them, sat in on meetings (including board meetings), experienced the art as many times and in as many ways as he could, and met with local political officials and other arts leaders in their communities (to get a sense of the “arts-mosphere”). I also interviewed as many audience participants as humanly possible, wherever they happened to be, painstakingly transcribing each interview, in order to understand the success of the organization and that relationship to their collective decision to thrive in their respective communities. It can be done. It has been done. And this book will give you some ideas on how to transform your nonprofit arts organization into an impact catalyst, too.
It’s available for pre-order right now and is selling for about $20 or so. Use the QR code in the blisteringly busy image below or just visit this website: https://bit.ly/3SZFIb0. Do it before you decide to close down. Really.
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