Prior to becoming a member of the board of directors, I worked with Pointless Theatre Company to develop an Adaptive Impact Plan, in lieu of strategic planning. Adaptive Impact Planning is something I developed in the course of writing my Master’s Thesis, Your Mission if You Choose to Accept it: Strategic Planning in a Nonprofit Visual Arts Context. You can read the full text of my thesis, available under a Creative Commons license, here.
My process with Pointless involved a month of individual interviews with key staff members , as well as group conversations with the full company of performers and the board of directors. The areas we discussed included:
- The Mission
- Target Impact
- Target Audience
- Current Audience
- Current Programming
- Target Programming
- Current Impact and Effectiveness of Programming
- Audience Expectations
- Core Competencies
- Key Obstacles
From there, we developed an Adaptive Impact Plan. We established five priorities, with the input of the company, which ranged from artistic excellence to paying artists a living wage. We then wrote six questions to guide decision-making. As new opportunities arise for the company, they can review these six question to determine whether to move forward, ensuring at all new activity aligns with their priorities without rigidly imposing a traditional 5-year-plan structure on the company.