3 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS TO ASK AS YOU START PLANNING FOR 2023
For Arts Organisations
The beginning of the year is an ideal time to reflect on our work and plan for the year. Reflections start with asking the right questions. Here are three critical questions that arts organisations must ask themselves to help envision their organisation’s strategy for the upcoming year. The ideas and decisions emerging from this process will also steer the long term course of your organisation.
1. WHO ARE YOUR AUDIENCES?
Audiences are at the heart of arts experiences. They attend arts events for various reasons – for entertainment, inspiration, because it gives them a sense of community, they want to be part of a larger shared cultural experience and so on. Unless you delve deeper and understand why audiences engage with your organisation, growth and sustainability may eventually become a challenge.
The following questions provide you a good starting point in your journey towards understanding your audiences.
- Where do your audiences come from?
- What are their demographics?
- Why do they engage with art?
- What motivates them to engage with your organisation?
- Have your audiences grown in the past 2-5 years ?
The post-pandemic world is posing unique challenges for arts organisations in attracting and retaining audiences. Arts is competing against not just OTT platforms and other forms of entertainment, but several other leisure activities such as travelling, outdoor experiences, family reunions etc.
Unless we understand the perpetually evolving preferences of our audiences and provide experiences that are meaningful to them, they will always find something more worthwhile of their time.
2. WHAT ARE YOUR TOP 2 FOCUS AREAS FOR THE YEAR?
Goal setting and identifying key focus areas are integral to strategically planning for your organisation’s future. Most often, arts organisations unintentionally get more involved in the day-to-day operational activities and do not spend enough time in planning for the future.
A few examples of focus areas could be:
- To present one large international production.
- To roll out a membership programme for young audiences
- To digitise content and monetise it
These are just sample focus areas. Remember that your focus areas will need to stem from your overall vision and must align with the strategic direction of your organisation. Perhaps now is a good time to bring your team together and think about your priorities for the coming year.
3. HOW WILL YOU MEASURE IMPACT?
The most important aspect of having plans is not only about executing the activities but in monitoring and measuring their impact. A good place to start thinking about impact measurement for your work is to ask the following questions:
- How does success look like for your initiative?
- What are the key indicators that you want to measure?
- How do we go about collecting the data?
This exercise needs to be done at the planning stage of the initiative so that the indicators are tracked over the course of the activity. Measuring impact is critical to help plan for future initiatives, help understand if resources have been used optimally, and reflect on the initiative itself and its impact on the respective target audience segments.
We hope that the answers to these questions will help carve out the future direction for your organisation. Best wishes from Team ArtSpire for an eventful and successful 2023!
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Ramya Rajaraman
Founder & Director, ArtSpire
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Connect with us if you would like to brainstorm regarding your arts organisation’s strategic direction and future. Write to [email protected] or [email protected] or DM us on Instagram.