Strategic Planning or Strategic Posturing: Whose Expectations Must Cultural Organizations Meet?

TCC’s Ten Keys to Strategic Planning, provides a solid overview of nonprofit strategic planning – its goals and processes, plus examples of positive outcomes. It offers succinct definitions of differences between a strategic plan (mission/goal focus), an operational plan (task focus), a business plan (product/investment focus) and a case statement (marketing/fundraising focus) (2).

However, I did have some concerns about TCC’s focus – such as listing only internal staff/Board, funders, and partner organizations as stakeholders in the planning process (2). What about constituents or recipients of the nonprofit’s services? Similarly, TCC cautions that not all views are equal (3) and that too many voices could push the planning process into anarchy (4), citing the example of a school with many alumnae. Perhaps the most telling example was that of a victims’ service agency that planned with only the staff and Board members! Talk about what’s broken in the nonprofit sector!

Like so many things in the nonprofit world, strategic planning has become a funder-driven process. In the last decade or so, there’s been a real push by funders to have organizations, large and small, submit strategic plans with their grant proposals. Indeed, even the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, which gives grants to the smallest organizations in Philadelphia (even those with less than a $50,000 total budget), requires documents that evince planning with their application. This sounds like a positive turn of events, but often plans are created for funder consumption, using consultants recommended and paid for by the funders, advocating programs that are appealing to said funders. TCC’s document also emphasizes the usefulness of an outside consultant (8), as one would expect. After all, it’s a document promoting their services.

For small and large organizations alike, the urgency to put together a planning document for a grant proposal often supersedes the longer term work of thoughtfully engaging community stakeholders and determining how best to fulfill their needs. However, very few plans are available for public viewing, and the vast majority of those that are available read more like publicity brochures or case statements that plan by analyzing organizational strengths and weaknesses, milieu, and client/stakeholder needs.

The first plan from a local group that I found typifies this approach – the National Constitution Center, 2011-2015. This is not to say that NCC did not conduct a more in-depth analysis of their position in the sector – their needs and assets, along with those of their audiences members and the Philadelphia community at large. At best, one can assume records of these more difficult conversations – deemed "not fit for public consumption" – remain private to the organization, if they exist at all. The document is very slick and well designed, with large photos of details of the NCC displays, and little text on most pages.

After articulating the mission and vision of the organization (which could have been just taken from their website), the document details five very conceptual “strategic objectives”: thrive, speak, teach, must-see, and reach (8-9). Each of the concepts is defined in follow-up sections, with three to thirteen bulleted “strategies” through which to achieve them (11-9). No specific measures of success, outcomes, indicators, or desired metrics are listed. A subsequent section states that NCC “will measure, benchmark and then set specific targets to work toward in each of these areas,” but that work is put off until yearly “work plans” can be developed (21).

Although the plan encompasses the years that were part of the Great Recession, there is no mention of financial issues, aside from the generic need to “maximize revenues, expand and diversify the base of philanthropic support, and build the endowment” (19). NCC’s plan concludes with a statement describing the planning process as “managed internally” through interviews conducted with staff, Board, funders, local and state policymakers, and partner organizations. No direct contact with city residents – audience members or otherwise – occurred (23).

The second plan I found was from a small, grassroots nonprofit based in North Philadelphia, the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, 2011-2013. Although the document appears shorter than NCC’s (fifteen vesus twenty-five pages), it contains much more information – with no photos or graphics, just full pages of single-spaced discussion.

NSNP’s plan includes an in depth analysis of its constituency’s demographics and perceived needs, as well as a history of how the organization has served the community (7-8). It also contains a table of current programs with outputs and metrics as an appendix (14-5). NSNP’s plan describes conducting a “360° evaluation” of the organization as part of the planning process, including interviews with “key stakeholders with varying relationships to NSNP: funders, partner agencies, competitors, parents, youth and community residents” (5). I was especially struck by the ideas of including competitors’ viewpoints in the planning process; the organization certainly investigated how it was positioned from every vantage point (6, 9-10).

These perceptions were further filtered through a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis by an outside consulting group, ultimately informing the four strategic goals of the plan (9-10) – simply labeled Program Development, Leadership Development, Marketing & Visibility, and Financial Development (11-2). Each goal includes objectives – such as, explore and implement, as feasible, earned income strategies (12) – but without identifying specific measures of success, outcomes, indicators, or desired metrics (as was the case with the NCC plan). However, NSNP states that they will next develop a separate “implementation plan” which “will include deliverables and indicators for success” (13).

Conclusions/Questions:

• Who’s viewing and using these strategic plans? Were they created because they’re a funder requirement? (NSNP focused on how it could serve/fill gaps while NCC focused on promotion.)

• Are there differences between plans presented for public (especially funder) consumption and those actually used by the organization internally?

• Is there actually follow-through with the work/implementation planning? (Neither organization had publicly available documents.)

• Who defines/sets metrics for success in reaching plans? (Neither plan had any listed, although NSNP has collected past metrics as evidenced in their appendix.)

• Do organizations want to acknowledge their weaknesses, or does that put them in a difficult position with funders and the public? (Neither organization mentions the financial issues that affected grant programs in the Great Recession.)

• Ultimately, who or what forces have a say in setting strategic goals? Is it all stakeholders or just those stakeholders who hold/want power? Is it those who give money, those who want to retain jobs or other affiliations? (NSNP had full 360° stakeholder input, NCC did not.)

• Are strategic plans promoting healthy organizations or are they just another marketing/fundraising tool? Or are they both? What does that mean for nonprofit missions – who are organizations in the cultural sector really serving?

^{Courtesy of BizTech}