A Tale of Two Contracts It’s April 1st, the start of a brand-new fiscal year, and Avril and Mavis, two project managers in a government agency, are hard at work. They’ve just wrapped their fiscal year end and are already moving forward on projects that were identified months ago in strategic planning. They’re excited about …
I do a lot of planning workshops, including a lot of small-group work with front-line staff and their immediate supervisors. I love the energy and creativity that flows from these groups. But one of my reservations in working with front line people is the risk of giving my participants high hopes and dreams for real …
A theory of change is a roadmap to the future that you want to see. It is plausible, feasible, and testable. And it stands between you and magical thinking.
As an interpretive planner, part of my job is helping parks, heritage sites, zoos, and aquariums identify the people around them whose lives or work will be affected by what they’re doing. So, early on in the interpretive planning process, I ask if we can sit down and identify their stakeholders. And more and more, …
Nonprofit memberships aren’t what they used to be. Is your organization struggling with its nonprofit membership program? Are you having a tough time keeping your membership numbers up? You’re not alone. Membership has always been a cornerstone of the nonprofit model: any society or association is by definition a group of like-minded people—members, official or …
It is becoming a well-known—dare I say best—practice in the heritage sector for each organization to assemble a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) advisory group. If you haven’t done so yet, you might really give it some serious thought. Who are these people? A DEIA Advisory Circle (or whatever they choose to name themselves) …
What is mission creep? If your organization has been around for a while, you may discover that you have a few lines of business that don’t fit into your mission, or perhaps fit only in the broadest possible way. That’s mission creep. How does that happen? Well, mission creep is the slow and insidious process …
There’s no sense telling your staff and public that you will be the top heritage attraction in the nation if you can’t craft a strategic plan (and budget) that will get you there. In my previous article, I outlined what I hope will be a fairly simple way to craft a relevant, realistic mission statement. The problem …
Mission statements should avoid vague and lofty turns of phrase like “transforms lives” or “provides hope” or “empowers wise choices”. All planning starts with a mission. From your mission statement flow your vision, your strategic goals, your management plan, interpretive plan, marketing plan… and all of the magical visitor experiences you live to facilitate. Without …
There’s no such thing as not having a brand. You have one, even as you read this. Branding is a vague and distasteful term. Particularly in the ecotourism and heritage sectors: nobody really wants to think of your cherished resource as a brand. So I’d like to establish what I mean by branding from the …
Read more “Branding Your Attraction: It Ain’t About The Logo”