Strategic planning gets a bad rap. Hours of meetings. Hundreds of post-its. And at the end, all you get is a fancy document that collects dust on a shelf. So why do the words “strategy” and “strategic” seem to appear everywhere, justifying new priorities, now processes, and even new job titles? Join four senior strategy practitioners as they unpack what it really means to be strategic in a museum context, and how necessary it is to build healthier, more sustainable, and more resilient institutions for all.

Additional resources:

Strategy, So what? Using the Strategist’s Toolkit to Help Museums Thrive slides

Transcript

Andrew Cone: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this session, Strategy, So what? Using the Strategist’s Toolkit to Help Museums Thrive. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Among many, many terrific programming options. We’re thrilled to be here. And we hope today’s conversation will be engaging and productive. And we look forward to learning from all of you in the questions and discussion section. Which we’ve saved time for at the end of our presentation.

First of all, let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Andrew Cone. I’m the Whitney Museum of American Arts, chief curator. Excuse me, oh my gosh, not true at all. Chief Strategy Officer, Freudian Slip. I did study art history. I guess I need a slide to tell you my title. I use he/him pronouns. I’m a tall white man with brown hair and glasses and stubble. And I’ll pass it over to Andrea.

Andrea Kalivas Fulton: Good afternoon everybody. My name is Andrea Fulton and I am deputy director  and chief strategy officer at the Denver Art Museum. An I use the pronouns she/her/hers.

Erin Prendergast: Hello, my name is Erin Prendergast. I’m chief strategic initiatives at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Which is in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Are there other Canadians here today? Yay. Alright, well there’s one Canadian, Heidi that I’m sending a big hug to. My pronouns are she and her. And I’m delighted to be here. I’m am a middle-aged Caucasian woman with light hair. Thank you.

Hilary Branch: And I am Hilary Branch. My pronouns are she/her. White woman with short hair and what I think are fun glasses. When I said yes to this panel I was the vice president for planning and strategy at the Art Institute of Chicago.

And I’m now the principal at H .E. Branch Advisors, which is leadership level consulting that helps museums and other institutions become better decision makers.

Andrew Cone: In case you’re curious how this session came about, a few of us had been in contact as our roles were created almost all within the past five years and we were trading notes about like what does strategy mean to you and what is your role look like and what kind of work do you do and what tools do you use. So we thought it could have been a meaningful conversation for others too and we know that there are more roles like ours popping up in the museum space and we’d love to hear from you if you yourself consider yourself a strategist all right so just how we’re going to go through the session today.

Andrea Kalivas Fulton: We have four parts. We’re going to talk a little bit about our definitions and framing up front. We’re each going to talk about an institutional case study and which strategy was put to good use, we hope. And then we’re going to have a little bit of a group discussion.

We have some preset questions for each of us, and then we really want to leave a number of minutes for Q &A. So, we’re going to cut ourselves off at 245 and hopefully learn from all of you.

So, I think the biggest question, and one we get a lot, and maybe is why so many of you are in this room, is what is strategy and how do you use it? So, there are many, many, many definitions of strategy, but one that held some weight for me, and I think resonated with this group, was that it’s really the practice of bridging a long -term goal with the plans and resources necessary to achieve it, and a tool used to make decisions to keep moving in the direction of that goal.

It’s really simply, it’s a path forward to achieving something big, is what I would say. And so, strategy is often used most in our institutional context around a strategic plan, which is good. That’s a way many people across staffs engage with strategy at a really core level, and if done well, a strategic plan is a really good representation of the path forward and the way that you’re going to leverage all your tools and resources to get there.

But strategy exists every day in all the places, right? I think everybody in an organization has the capacity to be strategic and to leverage strategy. And if an institution has put a strategy together that is accessible and cross -disciplinary, it should be used across an institution and by everybody within it. But there are lots of frameworks, there are lots of systems, but really a strategy is often even just a set of questions or a lens that you’re asking yourself as you move toward making decisions or picking a direction.

And so, we’re going to talk a little bit about what some of those things might be and how hopefully you all can leverage it in your organization.

Hilary Branch: So, what is a strategy? How do we ascertain whether something is a strategy? Thank you. There are some characteristics that is your proxy when you are not in the room to aid decision making.

You can’t be in every room. You can’t be in every day. But if you have a good strategy, it helps the people who are in that room make a good decision. And all of this should come to to drive for the desired outcome to a role.

So what isn’t just strategy? People love to grow around the word strategy and strategic, and I both love it and hate it. Some good rules of thumb are, if it doesn’t drive a decision, it’s actually a principal or value. If it doesn’t apply to more than one project, it’s a tactic. And if it doesn’t have compelling alternatives, if you couldn’t say make a good case to do the exact opposite, it’s a best practice. That doesn’t mean that principles value tactics and best practices are not valuable in something you should be using, it just means that those things aren’t strategy.

Andrew Cone: So why is this work so challenging? You know, each of us have had conversations with staff in our own museums as well as peers elsewhere that as the sort of blurb for this session outlined is like, oh God, I have a strategy session or like, here we go again, strategic planning. And at its worst, yes, it can feel like that. But, you know, I think the key components of why it can feel difficult are, in general, strategy for any organization be it for-profit, non-profit, social sector you know inertia and entropy are powerful forces. Organizations are just groups of people of different sizes and they all just want to do their best work. And their best work may not be defined in the same way in their own head as it is together as an organization. And it’s really a practice to point everyone in the same direction.

Change in general is hard. Right. Someone once said to me, “museum management is change manage,” I don’t think any of us are here today to sort of protect the status quo. And what that means is that you are asking people to change the way they work. To change how they work and sometimes to change who they think of themselves as if they define their identity in their place of work, which is so common in the museum sector. And strategy must be simple. We’ll get to this a little bit later, but strategy is most effective when it can be articulated really clearly and simply, and that is really hard. Brevity is really hard. And as I mentioned, specifically in the museum sector, professional and personal identities often intermingle so it can feel like when you say no to a strategy, you’re saying no to a person, and that’s really hard. We all I know are such collaborative colleagues that we also need to find ways to use evidence and perspective and systems to enable that kind of strategic no. I also would highlight the fact that appetite for risk really varies in our sector. Right. Our business model, right, our governance models don’t always enable risk taking. Sometimes, some of us are much more risk taking within our galleries than we are behind the scenes or as an organization. And that can be hard to negotiate. And lastly, I’ll say, we all are overworked, right. And so, if there is yet another thing on your to-do list which is like figure out how all of this fits into a strategy or it doesn’t, that also can feel vague, unnecessary, or even intimidating.

And I think the important thing is that, as Hillary said, if a strategy is really a strategy and an effective one, it itself can mitigate some of the very challenges that I just outlined.

Erin Prendergast: Great. I’m just going to go up here to forward the slide. So, we heard from Andrea that strategy can be in many, many different forms. We heard from Hillary that good strategy should be mission -aligned and very focused. And we heard from Andrew that it can sometimes be challenging. So why do we want to consider taking on strategies? Well, we all work in a sector that we’re very proud of, and we all want the museum sector to become stronger, healthier, more robust and incredibly high quality. Ultimately, we all want to advance the museum sector forward.

And in the context that we’re speaking of today, it’s very much in a museum setting, and we’re talking about mission-aligned goals that provide focus and discipline to help achieve a desired outcome.

And the benefits of utilizing great strategy can outweigh many of the challenges, good strategy builds cohesion and strengthens culture. And can be a wonderful catalyst for change. I love to talk about Charles Darwin who had a very famous theory about evolution. And Darwin’s theory was that it’s not the strongest species who survive, it’s the most adaptable. And to me, I equate great strategy with adaptability. Change is going to happen no matter what. You might as well be a part of it, help facilitate it, and be adaptable as possible for your organization so that your organization stays current and relevant.

Within museums, strategies can have a very narrow focus. Right now, we’re integrating Tessa Tura into our museum, or it can have a very broad focus. What is our exhibition plan, for example? So today you’re going to hear about a combination of narrow and broad strategies and how we incorporated them at our four organizations.

So, this is a perfect segue into the first of our four case studies, which starts with me. I’ll start momentarily.

I will talk about our classic audience strategy. Andrea will talk about her strategy about being more welcoming to the whole community in Denver. Andrew will speak about a very significant and important strategy at the Whitney Museum of American Art. And Hillary will talk about her experience leading a strategy of exhibition planning, and I won’t give it all away, but a lot of it happened during COVID. So, there are complexities that we have all faced recently, and we’ve all learned from and grown from. And that’s why we’re here today to share with one another.

So, the Art Gallery of Ontario, I’m going to talk to you about our audience strategy. Just to give you a little bit of context, the AGO is located in Toronto. We are one of the largest museums in North America. We attract about a million visitors annually. We have roughly 640 or so people who work at the museum. Our collection is more than 120,000 works. Everything ranging from contemporary to Canadian stars such as the westwind here, indigenous, European, and masterpieces etc. These images of the building are of an expansion we did a number of years ago by the architect Frank Gehry who some of you might know. Yes, I know he lives in LA, but he actually grew up around the corner from the AGO and he’s Canadian, so that was a wonderful experience. And that’s actually how I grew into my current role, I am a fundraiser and was the campaign manager for Transformation AGO, and that’s sort of how I evolved in my role at the AGO to take on this new portfolio of strategic initiatives a couple of years ago. A couple of last things, I will just say that we host a wide range of exhibitions and programs, for example right now we are working with the Baltimore Art Museum on a partnership – yay Baltimore – really wonderful partners for an exhibition called Making Her Mark which features works by women in Europe from the 1400s to the 1800s. We also have Cause, the contemporary on right now. We just finished Keith Herring, Art is Everybody, with the Broad, and we’ve also working with the Tate on Life Between Islands, which is Caribbean art from the 1950s till now. So broad range of exhibitions and programs.

And I’m just going to jump ahead here. So, in 2017, we started looking at a new 10 -year vision, which we call AGO 2028.

So, in order to start and talk about our strategic plan, we thought, well, let’s look to see what Toronto will look like in 10 years. That’s where we started.

So, we knew that Toronto’s population by 2028 would be roughly 8 million. We also knew that 65 % of the people who lived in our city would be born outside of Canada. And more than half would be visible minority, racialized, non-white population. We also knew that Toronto would be among the top-ten wealthiest cities in the world. Toronto has more capital than Paris, France for example. And we would have a very diversified economy with significant growth in the tech sector.

And this is our vision, as you will see above, which essentially means we want to lead, we want to lead from our city of Toronto, and we want to reflect the people who live in our city.

So again, that’s very sort of mission focused. Our vision statement had four pillars and today I’m going to talk to you about specifically the reflect the people who live here part of that vision statement our audience strategy. Why did we decide on this strategy and what was the problem we were trying to solve well we wanted to shift our audience so that by 2028 it would be must more representative of our city so younger and more diverse and we wanted to be positioned well to adapt to the changing demographics of our city.

This slide demonstrates that often strategies are not working in isolation from other activities. Our main sort of strategic priorities are very intertwined and interdependent on one another. To fulfill our audience strategy, we had to make changes to our content, our exhibitions and programs. We had to change how we were telling our story. And who defined who we were marketing to. And how we were fulfilling our objectives to make the AGO more accessible, welcoming, and inclusive. And what was my role in all of this? We like to joke, a little therapist, a little bit diplomat. But really, it’s about connecting the docks throughout the museum so that everyone is invested, feels part of the strategy, sees how they are moving it forward. It’s important for everyone to sort of be accountable so that everyone is heading in the same direction. Really simple, regularly, like all the time, communicate very simply through graphics, through few words, what the strategy is, and really my role was to empower others. It’s sort of behind-the-scenes kind of role.

You’re really empowering the specialists in your organization, the marketers, the curators, the educators, to work together to move a specific strategy forward. And of course, really important in my role to bring the board of trustees along. I also have board relations in my portfolio and bringing trustees along so that they’re supportive of the museum’s activities is key.

This is an example of some of the changes we had to make in our collection strategy that would ultimately impact our audience strategy and we adjusted our collecting focus so that there was greater emphasis on collecting works from the global African diaspora, contemporary Asian, and women artists in particular.

So what were some of the tactics we used to implement our audience strategy. This was one of the biggest ones, in the spring of 2019 we launched a new annual pass program. Which gave everyone who was 25 and under free admission to the gallery, and a very accessible price point of $35 for those 25 and over to attend the museum. And why we introduced this was we wanted to, obviously reduce barriers but encourage repeat visits, develop long -lasting relationships with our audience so that really we’re building, cultivating, and stewarding our audience for the future. I wish, like Baltimore, we could always be free. Our business model means that we get about a third of support from our provincial government, a third from self -generated revenue, and a third from philanthropy. So, we are trying to maintain as much accessibility as possible while still achieving one of our values, which is financial equilibrium.

So this was the result of our strategy. Our audience has changed. I just want to emphasize it’s really important that you measure progress and that you track all your data so that you know whether your strategy is working or not, and you can pivot and adjust accordingly. But we were able to measure the results of all the changes that were implemented, content, DEIA initiatives, branding, etc. Currently, more than half of our audience identifies as non-white, which is 4 % greater than the current demographics of Toronto, which means we’re well on our way to reflecting Toronto in 2028, and close to 60% of our audience is in their 30s or younger. So we’ve got a big millennial target audience. Which means we are building a robust pool of members and engaged visitors and potentially donors for the future.

And this is just a little bit of data. As I mentioned earlier, we have a very significant membership program, and we were able to grow it by roughly more than 260 ,000 people by launching the annual pass program.

And that is my presentation on the audience strategy. So, I’m going to pass it on to my colleague Andrea.

Andrea Kalivas Fulton: All right, so I’m going to talk a little bit about actually not even our current strategy of the Denver Museum because we just redid our strategic framework last year, but I’m going to go a little bit further back in time to just give you some context around piece of our plan and how we use strategy to implement it.

So, a little bit about the Denver Art Museum. Hopefully a lot of you were there last year for AAM. The Denver Art Museum is an organization that showcases, celebrates and inspires creativity. And we do that through incredible programs that leverage about objects in our encyclopedic collection. We serve about a half a million people per year. Give or take. We’re recovering still from the pandemic and that number is getting bigger, but we’re about a $38 million operation. We have about 400 employees just for scale. And we’ve invested about $275 million in this campus in the last 20 years.

So really rapid period of evolution and growth for us in these last couple of decades. My role, I’ve been there almost as long the museum has been around, no, I’m just kidding. I am actually capping a 23 -year career there here in a couple of months. And so one of the things that’s important about that, my title is Deputy Director and Chief Strategy Officer.

And it’s been Deputy Director, Chief Blank Officer, a few times before that. But the interesting thing about developing a role in your organization that is focused on strategy, I think there’s a couple of keys.

One is sometimes I think it’s really good for a long tenured employee to be the first to initiate a role like that.

And I think it’s because strategy is a little bit conceptual and a little bit amorphous to organizations sometimes. And so having someone who maybe has some depth of experience in an organization, maybe has held other roles in an organization, in my experience, and I think this is actually true for most of the folks on this panel, it kind of creates a credibility off the bat for a role like that that maybe wouldn’t be as easy for people to understand if it was someone brand new.

So, I say that, not saying that it couldn’t be wildly successful the other direction, I just think institutions are not always rapid to change. And this is a new type of role, I think, that’s emerged in the last five to 10 years. So that’s one little tip that I think was helpful for me. I think it also sometimes is a role that just holds a series of projects and initiatives that don’t fall neatly into one of the existing verticals.

And I think more and more as museums evolve, we’re becoming cross-disciplinary organizations and but we’re still built in this really vertical way, right? You’ve got curatorial and you’ve got learning and engagement, you’ve got marketing and you’ve got, and more and more we’re building these cross -functional teams, right to help solve problems in a bigger way. And so, in my opinion, this chief strategy role or the strategist role is really to help guide and sort of galvanize those cross -functional things that need to happen in an organization.

And as we’re being asked to evolve more and more rapidly, deal with social issues, deal with economic issues, deal with global pandemics, there are so many things bubbling up in our environments that maybe are a little bit unprecedented. And these kinds of roles can help focus the work around those things.

So, I’m gonna talk actually about a strategic plan that was first built in 2012. We called it Vision 2021. And it was one of those really big plans that had every tactic imaginable. It was 77 pages long and nobody ever looked at it kind of once it was done.

But there were some really amazing things that came out of that plan. This is the vision statement that we created, which was one of the very first times we ever had a vision statement. And so that was important to know, too. We hadn’t done that before. So, we came up with this really lofty, very wordy, aspirational vision that ultimately felt a little like it could be everything to everyone.

And I’m going to focus on that last part of it, which says a place that welcomes everyone. Because literally, that is being everything to everyone. And so, I’m going to break down how do we try to use strategy to define what that meant and to take us on a path forward.

Part of the strategic plan, we developed these five pillars. Which again, the time when we developed this, some of this is lessons learned. They were these sort of literal pillars. Like, verticals. And we built strategies underneath each one of those. But as we went through the decade of living this plan, we realized in order to be a true strategy we needed to touch on each one of these pillars. And if you don’t, if your strategy doesn’t hit each one of these it’s probably not a strategy, right? That’s the litmus test. So, that was some learning for us.

So, we built a strategy about this “welcoming everyone” idea that said this. So, it was a little more specific, it said “Create an environment that welcomes and engages a broad spectrum of our community.” So I want to point out a couple of key words that made this more of a strategy which had to do with crate and environment, so that was something very specific – we’re talking about our physical space, we’re talking about how people feel when they’re there. This idea of engages, this word engages, because yes you can welcome and say you’re invited but if you’re not actually engaging people in your programs and your collections that’s not maybe as impactful, that’s not delivering on your mission. And then this idea of our community. We really needed to specify who is the community that we’re talking about. Who are the people that we’re going to focus on? Because again, you could be everything to everyone.

So, we went through a process to try to make this a little bit more concrete. And really flesh out what are the frameworks that we’re going to use, these strategic frameworks to understand where we’re going with this and how we’re going to focus our resources.

So, we just went through a Why, Who, How. And like I said, there’s lots of strategic frameworks, this is just another decision-making framework that we used. So, first we had to go to the why. And we had to talk about why we care about welcoming the broadest spectrum of our community.

It’s our mission. That’s an easy one. And as part of our mission, creating greater access and greater relevance, are part of our mission. It’s also a sustainability concept. And you have to be honest about that. If you’re not willing to talk about future revenue and the fact that future audiences are your future revenue, you’re missing a massive part of the conversation. And so that’s just another lesson. A lot of museums want to talk about the intrinsic value and the impact we make on the individuals but if you’re not actually talking about what’s your pipeline and how are you going to sustain yourself as an operation, you’re missing out a little bit. So, calling that right out at the beginning.

So, then we wanted to talk about, okay so are really talking about. Because we needed to understand who is possible for our community. Right. So, for us, we had luckily through the efforts of a lot of people in our organization we had already started to build bridges out into certain segments of the community. And there’s always your kind of core audience, right? There’s those people that have been members forever. And of course, all of our goal is to try to grow that group and to really go out into a much more diverse community and be relevant to those people.

So we had some specific audiences that we wanted to target. We wanted to target families, which is something the museum has been focused on for a very long time. We wanted to dig deeper into our Latino audience which Denver is made up about 35 % of its population is Latino or of Latino origin and so that’s really important to us.

The idea of aging adults, Colorado has a really really active population and we have a really active older population so a lot of people where our median age is actually growing outside of our Latino population.

It’s the only one where the median age is lowering. And so we knew we wanted to focus on that audience. And then ultimately creatives was the other piece. We didn’t feel as connected to our creative community as we thought we could be.

So, then what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? So we set out to build a strategy to develop inputs and to evaluate those inputs along each pillar, decide what our outputs were, and then ultimately what our outcomes are.

So, for our inputs, we used advisory groups really heavily to build our strategies, and that’s just one way to do it. You can go out and do mass surveys, which we’ve done over time, but we really wanted to get specific voices of our community into our organization. And so we created advisory groups.

We had a Latino audience alliance, which was a new iteration of some supportive groups that we’ve had over time. We had an access advisory group that we formed. ongoing dialogues that we were having with this group.

We really let them know they were going to have, you know, significant input on the decisions that we were gonna make, whether it was the kind of content that went in our galleries, whether it was the way that our campus operated, we asked them all of those things. And what we heard, a few of the things that we heard were lower intimidation. So, get outside the museum, right? come to us come to where we are. Show me what I can do and how to do it be explicit it is not simple for someone who has not spent time in a museum to know exactly how to act it can be intimidating you all know this help me learn but make it fun that was important especially family audiences we heard that obviously but also hire artists our creative community said don’t just you know ask us to partner hire us and we heard that loud and clear and then finally. Be a platform for what matters to me right that’s easy that’s relevance right do something that is connected to who I am and what I care about.

So what were the outputs lots of outputs so I put the pillars up here because again everything we wanted to everything we wanted to create or outputs we had to connect back to all of these So I’m just going to focus on a couple, although there were so many. On the campus side, we went through a major renovation that opened in 2021, and that picture that you see, the third one on the right, on the top, is our welcome center. We built a brand new welcome center. And the literal design of that welcome center was driven by this feedback.

It was about not having a back to it, not being super intimidating, being able to see and see out all day, all night, see yourself literally in the space.

So that was a huge manifestation of this strategy. We also had to rebuild policies around the space. And I’ll come back to that a little bit in resources. But you might be able to build the space, but if it’s really hard for somebody to use it, that’s not very helpful. In fact, it sort of just swings the opposite direction on the pendulum. So, policies and practices are a huge part of welcoming space.

We build outdoor spaces, community flex spaces. we went fully bilingual on our already knew community we still use these ongoing advisory councils so making that a living breathing part of how we operate and then we went out into the community we built programs we have a traveling program called art lives here that goes into schools and community centers for a couple months at a time so really legitimately taking our work out our program we had artists collaborations to new levels spaces in the museum that we completely turn over to artists, constantly having artists and creatives and residents.

The gallery design obviously was super informed by the community, but then shared ownership or program, we’ve built spaces that literally host showcases of community art, we don’t curate this art. Our public schools curate this art, our other nonprofits curate this art. So having people be able to see that they’re not only worthy of being in the Denver Art Museum, but that it’s not just our voice that’s putting them But one thing I am going to focus just real quickly on, I hope we have time to do this. One of the big changes that we made that I think has made a huge difference had to do with our hours. So we, like everybody else, were open basically 10 to 5 -ish every single day, and every once in a while we’d have a late Friday night. Well, we heard, and we always had our free days on the weekend. And we heard loud and clear from our community that service workers don’t get to come on the weekends, usually. There’s a huge spectrum of the population that is working on the weekends and can’t take advantage of our free days. And sometimes those are the people’s with the largest economic challenges. And so we said, wow, that is so insightful and something we can easily do something about. So we actually shifted our free days. We still have some on the weekends, but every second Tuesday is free at the museum. What we also did was made that our late night.

Fridays are really competitive to be open late. Tuesday’s not so much. So, we made Tuesdays open late. And the other thing that did for us was it made it way cheaper to host an event at the museum on a Tuesday because security was already there.

The galleries were open. It eliminated a ton of ancillary costs for partners who wanted to host something at the Denver Art Museum. So that was one sort of seemingly, we all know operations are hard, easy move that we could make that immediately changed the way people used our institution during the week.

So, what are some of those outcomes? I just listed a couple. We have seen a drastic increase in partnerships and people using our facilities. We built this huge facility, tons of flex space. We are packed.

We have, I think we did 370 events last year, internal and external to the museum. So, it’s very heavily used, which is awesome.

Untitled, which is our quarterly program where we literally let artists take over the museum and we didn’t used to, we used to curate it a lot more carefully. And we decided through this feedback, we were literally handing the museum over to artists to curate a night. That attendance has doubled since we did that.

In gallery programs like mindful looking and drop -in drawing, which we target that creative aging population, have gone through the roof.

Things like staffing decisions, you know, making sure that we always had bi-lingual staff, not only in the museum but on all of our teams. Like our communications team, our Spanish language coverage increased significantly which has brought even more of our Spanish speaking audience to the museum and now we can actually deliver for them because the whole campus is bi-lingual.

So there’s this really beautiful circular reference that’s happening when we staffed across the institution to that bilingual strategy.

So. Lastly, I’ll just say, what was my job in all of this? And how did the strategy role fit into all of it. Just like Erin, I would say the real job that I had to do here was convening, collecting, and crystalizing the conversations. Helping people see how the through line worked for all of the different initiatives across the institution. And making sure that we were driving all of those large initiatives from that common place of strategy and vision.

Andrew Cone: Okay, two down, two to go. We’re all going to take a deep breath. As Renee taught us to this morning. I’m Andrew. I’m thankfully not the chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art but I am the chief strategy officer. For those of you who haven’t been the Whitney is a hundred year old institution. We’re in New York City, in lower Manhattan.

We celebrate modern contemporary American art and have since our founder, Drew Vanderbilt Whitney, herself, an artist, and a philanthropist founded the museum.

We have 450 staff, an operating budget of around $75 million, $750 ,000 to a million visitors a year, and about 27 ,000 works in our collection, just to give you some context for the conversation. My role was created in 2018, And unlike some of the other folks on stage, I was relatively new to the organization. There had been a slightly differently scoped role around planning, specifically and exclusively linked to our strategic plan before.

And my role expands that also to tackle revenue growth and business development, as well as research and analysis. I have a degree in art history but had been prior management consultant in the for -profit sector. And I’m happy to chat about that in the Q &A if interesting.

So, my case today is going to be a little process heavy. And I actually wanted to after Andrea because it follows and double clicks on some of the conversations that we had with the Denver Art Museum and, I think, highlights how peer to peer conversations can be so fruitful.

The two questions I want to frame today’s case with are, “How can a museum evolve artistic vision into institution strategy?” And specifically, for us, “how might a curatorial focus on Latinx art and artists transform the Whitney Museum of American Art?”

I think there are all sorts of different institutions here today that Whitney specifically works with a lot of living artists commissioning new work.

Our flagship show is a biennial, which hosts between 50 and 100 artists every other year, oftentimes premiering new work. And so we are a very curatorial program exhibition and artist -led institution. And strategy looks a little different in that context.

The journey for really embracing Latinx art, artists, and audiences which is the case I’m going to talk about today started when we moved downtown. So we moved from an old building uptown to a new building downtown. We opened in 2015 and there was a major exhibition that took over the whole museum called America Is Hard to See. And throughout the Whitney really what we keep coming back to is questioning and recontextualizing, what does it mean to be American? There have been times when people have wanted to take that out of the name of the museum, times when we’ve really leaned on it, times when that’s been controversial, when that’s been provocative, and I think that is a role that we play singularly, at least in New York City. And the process and the preparation for that show, which was entirely made up of our collection, really highlighted strengths, but also frankly deficiencies, and how we thought about the fullness, the diversity of the American experience, and specifically the diversity of the United States.

Two years later we hired a new curator, the first native Spanish speaker and the first Latinx expert, Latinx Art and artist expert on staff at the Whitney. She curated a show, Marcella Gurerro, she curated a show called Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay which was seven Latinx important Puerto Rican artists. And it actually was conversations with the artists rather than audience research, frankly, that started the conversation about we want to present our work in Spanish. We want to present our work in our native language. There were also indigenous languages to state that clearly but Spanish became this, sort of, curatorial conversation. And that’s how we started out journey to becoming a bilingual institution.

So that prompted a conversation. We had proof of concept. I’m going to skip over a lot of really messy details of trialing bilingual interpretation. And this was really only focused on the in -gallery on -site experience at first.

The next year, as I mentioned, we put up a biennial every year and some terrific audiences leaders, some of whom are here today, including our chair of education, Chris Scorza, sort of took that mandate and that, you know, really that open question from her curatorial colleagues, what does it mean to reflect true artistic identity, what does it mean to reflect audience identity more fully and intersectionally? And like Denver, 30 % of New York speaks, 25 % of New York households speak Spanish, 30 % of New York households are Latinx.

And so, it expanded not just to be about an artistic conversation about but being an audience and community conversation and it expanded from just being that on -site in gallery analog bilingual experience to include on -site and online content, interpretation, and programming.

Let’s skip a bunch of years ahead today after a lot of other inflection points and key hires. We built out more engagements, engagements, tactics, and touch points using an audience -first mindset, including, obviously, online content and programing during COVID. And now actually expanding across the museum floor by floor we are approaching becoming a fully bilingual on-site experience and we’re planning for a bilingual fully online experience.

So, that’s like the content and to really think about the process as we said strategy or a strategy to fully embrace, reflect, and serve a fully Latinx population in New York City was not named, per se, in our strategic plan

Our 2017 strategic plan proposed a metaphor, which we call the cultural village, which is where art artists and audiences convened to create culture. And you can see here three vertical strands, art artisan audiences, that’s what really any commissioning modern and contemporary art museum does, and the horizontal bands that intersect, our American identity, our staff, the people who do the work, our values of equity and inclusion, and our digital lens through which we work. That’s how we work, right?

And I would point out that actually those pillars or those strands in and of themselves, there were lots of strategic priorities under each of them, but it really was at the intersection of them that we found the most fruitful conversations. And we also took that approach with our audiences thinking about intersectionality, whether it be demographics or psychographics or the relationship to the museum so as a strategy team and as the lead strategist on the project I picked six examples of the work that we did and by the way you’re not supposed to be able to read these slides I know they’re really small they’re illustrative but like what did we do right we’re not the topical expert obviously I don’t have lived experience in this Latinx New Yorker population and it certainly is not my art historical expertise either.

So, we’re going to go back to this idea of convening, crystalizing again and again but we did do strategic envisioning. We articulated an institutional ambition, partnering with a lot of other leadership. In a second point, case making. A lot of what we did was thinking about stakeholders – board, finance committee, marketing, communications, education, community partners, how are we making a case not just for this work, but for our authentic place in this work? How are we listening? That has to do with audience research, landscape assessment, peer benchmarking, lots of conversations with folks like the Denver Art Museum who had been doing this work for years. And the third point I’ll sort of articulate is around defining success and measuring success.

So, what are the structured measured outcomes and how are we designing feedback loops to iterate over the course of this work.

Fourth, operations. This like really unsexy conversations of mapping person by person, tactic by tactic exactly what this means across publications, interpretation, and technology, finance and you kind of have to be able to get down in the weeds so that the 30,000 view actually makes sense.

Fourthly resource and financial planning.  We have to pay for this and I think Andrea said it really well you have to be realistic. We made a case for the revenue opportunity as well as the mission criticality. We made a case for earned revenue and we made a case for contributed revenue proposed streams at incremental growth the same way that we made a case for this is genuinely coming from our artistic community that we want to serve.

And lastly change management. We need to create a context in which the change can actually take hold. By appealing to both hearts and minds. So, we did a lot of data presentation and we also did a lot of storytelling. We invited experts like Gonzolo Casalles who was the commissioner of the DCLA Department of Cultural Affairs in New York, to give a talk to staff about the importance of being a bilingual institution.

We bring in outside speakers, we invite staff perspectives, and again, over -communicate again and again. And I would say the work definitely is not as clean and pretty as linear as it looks on this slide. It’s really messy, and that’s okay. But it also is about giving people permission to do this work even when you don’t have the answers figured out.

In a literal sense, we played a lot of roles, right? First and foremost, we were students. What is this topic? what do we need to know about it? What do other needs to know about it? We were co -creators and architects. Sometimes you’re playing a role of a survey or a synthesizer, a logician, really rigorous decision trees and logic trees to understand, asking why five times, asking uncomfortable questions, creating space to have uncomfortable discussions.

Obviously, research, quantification, iteration, you’re also sometimes thinking like an engineer and a tactician. You’re also thinking about mediating or, you know, being a group therapist when there is disagreement. And lastly, I think, really importantly, a mobilizer and an accelerator and an evangelist of the work ahead.

So, where did that land us in terms of the impact of the work? There are so many things I could highlight. We also have this as a focus of a collections strategic plan, which outlines the collecting priorities of the institution.

We are, as I said, marching towards becoming a bilingual online and on -site institution. There are Latinx community and programming partners, expert advisors. We have consultancies who specialize in both PR and marketing for Latinx populations in New York City.

We have a bilingual audience researcher who’s here, Marcia, in the front row. And we also really paid attention to hiring across other areas. Front of house and audiences, sure, but also back of house roles and teams that we wanted to sort of mobilize to embrace this work as well so just a few very brief statistics I know that it’s really tough to measure some of this but our collection drastically shifted our visitorship went from 10 to 15 percent Latinx to 15 to 25 percent and we know from our visitor research that even if you don’t speak Spanish over three -fourths of visitors felt more positively about the Whitney seeing a bilingual experience on site which was which was all enabled by the expertise of staff.

And our staff has gone from 2017 to 2023, from 11 to 15 % Latinx. And we’re still listening, and we’re still learning. So, the journey continues.

Hilary Branch: Thank you, Andrew. OK, my job is to get us some time for Q &A. I’m going to be brief. These slides will be available later. And I think we are willing to stay a little late so if we don’t get to you we will do our best afterwards.

So, if you paid attention our examples today are going from really big picture to slowly, slowly getting more specific. More concrete, and I have the most concrete example of the them all. This is going to be an example of how strategy impacts process.

It’s purely internal. It is not visitor facing, although with everything we do, visitors are ultimately impacted. So the Art Institute in general has a $100 million annual operating budget,

1 .5 million visitors a year, 1 .6 in a good year, 100 ,000 members, 500 plus staff. And importantly for this conversation, over 30 temporary exhibitions a year, or depending on how you measure rotations and that sort of thing, it’s over 50. It is a huge pinch point operationally, and it impacts literally every single team in the museum.

So, when we got exhibitions mentioned in the strategic plan, we said this is an opportunity. This is the quote in the strategic plan, six words, balance popular, scholarly and experimental exhibitions six tiny words so much work. The takeaway here is the strategic plan where it was useful here is it pointed us to where we needed to do more work this was our moment this was okay we’re saying this is important and let’s invest time, resources, people’s energy into figuring this out. Strategy took the lead here and essentially served as a neutral third party. That was particularly important because this is about balance.

I was not a topical expert. I also didn’t have goals that were related to anything that we were talking about balancing. So, I didn’t have a dog in the fight. My goal is truly the balance and bringing that perspective I think was helpful.

So, how did we start. We knew this vaguely kind of needed to be the process. Right. Get some information, review that information and make a decision and then schedule the exhibition. We didn’t quite know what this would look like but this is where we started. And the strategy comes in when we were making decisions. Right. So, the information, not strategy. Review & approval and scheduling, those are the steps where strategy is going to come into play.

So, we started by asking ourselves what do we need at this information stage in order to make good decisions in the review and approval and scheduling phases. We wrote down every single question that we could come up with that we would like to know the answer to you in order to make a decision. There were easily more than 75 questions that we would love to know before we even said, yeah, maybe to an exhibition. Here are a selection. One, what’s the exhibition thesis? We weren’t asking this. Seems pretty useful. But what curatorial department is this coming out of? What’s the nature of the artwork? Is it going to be really heavy? That’s going to be good to know. How does this fit into the museum’s DEIA commitments. Is it going to be traveling? How expensive do we think it’s going to be? Does this exhibition potentially have popular appeal and drive incremental attendance to the museum? Even so tactical as what’s the value of the artwork going to be? Are we going to have an insurance problem? Is there time sensitivity? Is there an anniversary? Is there a conference? Is there something that we should link it to? And really, really importantly, what kind of impact is this going to have on departmental workloads?

So we took all of these, every question that we could get someone to tell us and we ended with these three categories. Now, you are asking yourself, why did I spend an entire slide on three words, basically? One just proving you that C is not just for cookie it is also for content but choosing the categories is a strategic decision so for instance we could have split budget into expenses and revenue and had those be two different categories but that means that two of our four categories then would be financial content you could split that a million different ways logistics same way but this was the categorization we landed on because we thought these categories had equal weight and we wanted to consider them with equal weight. Now this isn’t exactly the line in the strategic plan which you might recall is balanced popular scholarly and experimental exhibitions this goes beyond that and I think that’s a really important learning is that the strategic plan is your starting point but the work that you do based on that plan is going to change and shape it and get more concrete and that’s okay and you should embrace the fact that it changes and evolves.

So, this is what our process ended up looking like. That information step turned into three, a proposal, a written proposal and two meetings – content and logistics – approval, review and approval lived on as did scheduling. I’m not going to go into the greatest of detail here to make sure we have some time for q and a but i think one key takeaway here is these groups whether or not they have approval power it was very important to keep them tightly focused. I like to have a group that is no more than seven people, to have a good and effective conversation and to make a decision. Helpful from a number of ways, builds trust, easy to have that back and forth dialogue, but we were very, very thoughtful about who we had at these tables to ensure that this would give us what we needed from the process.

So, what kind of impacts did this have? Well, one, we shoved every exhibition that was currently on the calendar through an abbreviated version of this project. Curators loved me.

What that helped us do, though, is identify future resourcing shortfalls. So, we had a lineup, it’s in 2027, so thoughts and prayers to our paintings conservation department, where they have an absolute nightmare of a schedule challenge. But we know that. We knew that now. We knew that far ahead. So, we are going to be able to get them external resourcing. We are going to reach out and fill in some of those gaps to make sure they are appropriately supported during that time. We were also able to re -scope a planned exhibition and move it in time.

Another popular moment with curators, I said, can you do this nine months early and make it four times as big? Many things to the curator who said yes to that and that resulted in a $1 million budget lift for us. We also have seen some processes like title discussions kick off earlier because when people have information early they can start to plan and they can start to foresee the challenges that are coming so for instance if they know this is going to be a really challenging conversation to find the right title they can start that early they have the information to do that. And it also reconceptualized the work of the exhibitions team they stopped becoming just project managers in some ways and they started to become I would say stewards of the strategic plan specifically but also just they are they are process managers they have a bigger view now it is not just they’re moving from step A to step B. They are guardians of the strategy in the museum.

So with all of that I’m going to attempt to draw the key lessons out of all four presentations this was actually really interesting for us to learn from each other and sort of determine what the common lessons were that we learned in the course of all of this work So here’s a big one.

The no’s are just as important as the yeses. I would say more important, I threw that one in. You should be saying no to projects way more often than you say yes. The strategy is making you make a call.

You have to choose from among multiple good ideas. I know it’s hard. I know it’s hard. It’s so sad to say no to a good idea. But that is what a strategy is going to help you do so that you can put all of your resources behind a couple projects rather than a small fraction of your resources behind a million.

Strong change management skills is incredibly critical, you’ve got to get the whole institution through this and it is hard for anyone to do. Also key, strategy doesn’t necessarily make the decision every single time. Sometimes what it does, like in the case of these categories, is seeking a balance is it gives you the framework for a discussion.

All of the work, the strategy, the work that comes out of it is iterative and ongoing, so do not expect it to stay static. And finally, and we thought really important, you know, we have all art museums up here, but we have all found that you do not need to be a topical expert to lead in this work, to lead a strategy discussion. I have absolute faith that all of these lovely people I’ve gotten to know could help in a zoo or in a botanic gardens. Strategy, you can carry the skillset through no matter what subject you’re working in.