Missouri Art Council – Newsletter – December 2015

Thus begins Sprinkling Magic: How to Make Strategic Planning Work, an article created for our previously printed Artlogue magazine by Dr. John McClusky, founder and 35-year director (now emeritus) of the Nonprofit Management and Leadership Program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Dr. McClusky proffers a six-step plan for making planning succeed:

1. Prepare for your planning. Think through carefully, “Who should participate in the planning and at what stages?”

2. Decide who’s in charge: board, staff, or consultant? “The worst thing to do is have an outside consultant draft the plan for you; the next worst is to have the staff draft the plan and the board rubber stamp it.”

3. Build support for the plan so that you can actually implement it.

4. Focus and set priorities. “The first planning decisions should be discarding what is not working or has never worked.”

5. Focus on a few, truly strategic issues or result areas. “Far from formulating a ‘comprehensive’ or ‘total’ plan, the entire effort must target the absolutely most important issues facing your organization over the next three to five years.”

6. Stretch but don’t break your organization’s “rubber band.” “Effective planning involves stretching your thinking about your organization beyond its current resources, capabilities, and restraints, but not so far as to break it.”

To read the entire two-part article, click here for a PDF.

Since 1993, the Nonprofit Management and Leadership Program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis has offered comprehensive training and courses, both credit and noncredit, for college students, nonprofit professionals, and community members in topics such as leadership and management, legal and financial issues, and grant writing.

Reimagining the Orchestra Subscription Model was commissioned from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman by the League of American Orchestras. Many of its findings and recommendations stretch to include all sorts of performing arts. “Declines in subscriptions are occurring throughout the performing arts sector, not only at orchestras,” said League President and CEO Jesse Rosen. “We knew we had to begin to examine this issue in a data-driven fashion in order to give our field the tools they need to counteract the trend.”

Some of the results the study documents:

• Raising prices to cushion a loss in sales won’t help. “For average ticket prices, we are already within a few dollars of the walk-away price.”

• One kind of subscription is growing: choose-your-own. Customized subscriptions were up by 67%. And customized packages were the favorite choice of new patrons. “This suggests that the subscription model isn’t dead; it just needs to be rethought.”

• Donor-style perks work for subscribers too. “There’s an appetite for a sense of belonging. People want to be told they are special, that they are a platinum member. Orchestras need to make them feel attached to the organization beyond the concert, to be part of a group that gets special treatment. Perhaps they get member lounges, meet-and-greets with artists, or digital downloads of concerts that are only available to members. People are willing to pay for those things, which all enhance the core concert experience.”

• The time to try new programs for subscribers is now. “You know the old product isn’t working that well. But if you change, you lose revenue in the short term. You want to change when you’ve got a little leeway, not when you are in a panic situation and you have already lost your audience. Now is the time to create a new model and transition gradually.”

The League of American Orchestras offers the study’s findings in several forms, all for free: the full report, a summary article from the fall issue of Symphony magazine, a webinar video, and an interactive version optimized for iOS devices.