{"id":1452,"date":"2025-08-19T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/scenechange\/?p=1452"},"modified":"2025-08-19T14:48:18","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T14:48:18","slug":"a-strategic-plan-for-your-flailing-nonprofit-arts-organization-is-just-a-waste-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/scenechange\/2025\/08\/19\/a-strategic-plan-for-your-flailing-nonprofit-arts-organization-is-just-a-waste-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"A Strategic Plan for Your Flailing Nonprofit Arts Organization Is Just a Waste of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As Kate Larsen so brilliantly puts it, a strategic planning session is not the same thing as a strategic plan session.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If this picture makes you think of your company\u2019s present or future fortunes, the last thing you need is a strategic plan document.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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I\u2019ve contributed to them. I\u2019ve written them. I\u2019ve defended them. And more than once, I\u2019ve been burned by them. But still, it\u2019s always the first thing every board chair tells every consultant that their company really needs one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A strategic plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily for you, things have progressed so poorly on the nonprofit arts front \u2014 moving away from the real reason your charity exists in the first place is never a good strategy \u2014 that you may have postponed the full-tilt swan dive into the 1970s version of a solution: craft a strategic plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yeah, that\u2019ll get you out of this mess.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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I love listening to Kate Larsen<\/a>. You should, too, even if you\u2019re 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<\/a>. <\/em>And while it\u2019s Australia-oriented, the lessons apply in the US in a big way.) On July 18, she posted a rant (well, to her <\/em>it was a rant, anyway) about arts organizations being so focused on creating a strategic plan that they\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s, like, 2% of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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