It is one thing to read about planning in an ideal universe, and quite another to find yourself in the trenches actually dealing with planning issues that never appeared in any written text or toolkit. The case studies that follow show how five states in very different environments—geographic, cultural, political, economic and social—have tackled the challenge of planning and devised their own solutions. All of them counsel creating methods germane to your unique situation. Even so, there is much to be learned from each of them and we hope you will find their stories full of useful ideas, some of which you may want to adapt to your agency.

Case Studies at a Glance

Arizona Commission on the Arts

As of this printing, the Arizona Commission on the Arts (ACA) has just created a new plan that will take it from 2001 to 2006 as it completes its last plan, Arts in Arizona to the Millennium: 1996-2000. The current effort is headed by Executive Director Shelley Cohn and Programs Administrator Mollie Lakin-Hayes, in conjunction with program staff, the commission and the commission’s Policy Committee.

Arizona is a large state geographically, with phenomenal population growth that is concentrated in urban areas (85 percent live in either the Tucson or Phoenix metro regions). This has exacerbated the disparity in access to the arts in rural communities. To ensure broad public input, the agency has engaged in a statewide effort of county forums, arts forums, and one-on-one interviews with community leaders. These have been advertised through invitations to targeted community leaders and grant applicants, the agency’s newsletter, its website, press releases, flyers, e-mail notices and faxes. Even so, Arizona, like many other states, has experienced low attendance by non-arts groups at public meetings.

The arts commission is not using any consultants for two reasons: in order to maintain direct contact with constituents, many of whom already have positive relationships with program staff, and because the administration has provided staff development in meeting facilitation. The best estimate for how much time will be devoted to the 18-month process is a total of 1,200 to 1,500 hours of commission and staff time: five to thirty percent of the programs administrator’s time per week, and an average of five percent of the executive director’s time per week (with more time spent during the writing phases, since that is primarily her responsibility).

The process has the following sequence of events:

• Community forums held in each Arizona county (for public and statewide arts and arts education service organizations).
• Commission reviews plan-in-progress and responds to community input.
• Agency staff integrates existing programs into plan and prioritizes plan elements.
• Staff implements technology planning process.
• Commission reviews draft plan and sends to all forum participants for more input.
• Staff develops budget proposal.
• Commission finalizes plan and budget.
• Staff develops performance measures.
• Final plan is adopted by commission and executive summary is made available.
• Plan and budget submitted to state, and then implemented.

The entire time frame was moved ahead three months from the original schedule to make sure it coincided with the legislature’s budget request timetable. Also, the agency is focusing more on rural areas during this planning process than it did in the past. Another important factor is the inclusion of artists in several focus groups and in most community forums.

The last plan contained a vision that was crafted with the help of a consultant. This time, the vision resulted from a process of brainstorming and discussions directly between the commission and staff. Three major funding priorities have been targeted: “signature” events in rural/ethnic communities; arts in education, particularly identifying and filling gaps; and artistic and management development of arts organizations.

• Position the arts within communities.
• Respect and value Arizona’s diverse cultures.
• Stimulate dialogue about the value of the arts.
• Act in partnership to preserve and strengthen the cultural vitality of communities.
• Value open communication with our constituents.
• Act strategically for the most impact from resources.
• Seek adequate funding to implement the plan.

These principles will underlie all goals and activities, and help ensure adaptability throughout the plan. To further solidify the plan’s flexibility, ACA treats its set of goals as “rudders” that help steer everything in the right direction even during sea changes in the environment. The plan articulates another interesting notion—that its services and programs are “tools” in the service of principles and goals. The tools listed in the new draft of the plan include:

• convening and facilitating
• information and referral
• professional staff assistance
• research
• technology
• funding

As a result of the county forums held already, the agency will include components to serve rural Arizona, such as expanding an initiative to fund “signature” events in rural and/or ethnic communities, and the convening of roundtable discussions with community and arts representatives to explore new partnering possibilities.

The agency is committed to the importance of partnerships. This commitment is highlighted by a new mission statement that includes the phrase “innovative partnerships” in its language, and the creation of six goals that are framed to express how the environment will have changed when the plan is successfully completed.

Arizona is very cognizant of the need to fashion performance measures for the plan and is currently looking nationally for better ways to create qualitative measures. In the past, evaluation of the plan has taken place in an annual review by the staff that is shared with the commission. The intent is to be even more strategic in this process in the future. Arizona is also being proactive about integrating the plan into all its activities primarily through extensive involvement of its staff throughout the entire process, guaranteeing their full commitment.

Prior to this time, program plan discussions were held separately from agency plan discussions. The arts commission will change this as it moves toward one unified planning, analyzing and evaluating cycle that more directly ties program evaluation to personnel evaluation. The hope is that program plans will always tie directly to the mission, that staff will clearly see the success of their programs tied to the success of the plan, and that performance measures will continually make the case for programs and budgets.

Once the plan is done, ACA intends to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible in different formats to match the variety of ways people now receive information. Mollie Lakin-Hayes, programs administrator, is very cognizant of the myriad ways that people enter the plan—legislators enter through mission and goals while constituents might enter through the tools section. “Wherever someone enters the plan, we want them to be able to connect where they are with the big picture,” says Lakin-Hayes. “My analogy is Tinkertoys. The little round hubs are the various components—mission, vision, goals, principles, tools, etc. I’d like to structure the plan so that whatever is your hub at the moment, you can follow it along the little blue stick to the next hub, and so on, so that eventually you can see, understand or buy in to the entire structure.” At the very least, in addition to the full plan, there will be an executive summary and a Web site version, although Lakin-Hayes hopes to have the plan available as an interactive relational database, or as a CD-ROM.

Shelley Cohn, executive director, identifies the biggest planning problem to be the time and effort it takes to design the entire process so that there is a balance in priorities and a clear notion of what is to be accomplished “…without getting everyone burned out.” In this respect, she has made a conscious decision to flesh out some elements as the planning happens, not in advance. This helps keep the process fresh and relevant. She warns against locking into a strict timeline in the beginning of planning. In addition to warning about how much time planning takes, Cohn counsels, “You really need to get staff participation in a meaningful way—that’s the key to making the plan work.”

Colorado Council on the Arts

When the Colorado Council on the Arts (CCA) began its long-range strategic planning process in 1995, it had just hired Executive Director Fran Holden. She and her staff knew it would be a major challenge to survey a huge geographic area with a citizenry dispersed over the “five states of Colorado,” which includes metropolitan Denver with a concentration of over 50 percent of the population.

With extensive community input, the CCA devised the following planning approach:

• Committee of the council defines planning parameters.
• Agency holds statewide arts conference.
• Agency conducts 35 arts town meetings throughout the state.
• Staff synthesizes information from arts town meetings.
• Staff identifies key issues and drafts the plan.
• Council adopts the plan.

• What are the issues facing your region? Can they be addressed through the arts?
• How can CCA best support the development of a flourishing cultural environment in your region?
• What is your recommendation for allocating CCA’s diminishing resources?

Artists were included both as participants and performers; every meeting began with a performance or presentation chosen by the host to celebrate the local arts scene.

Fran Holden estimates that during the full eighteen-month period, she spent 25 percent of her time and her staff spent 20 percent of their time on planning. The agency felt no need to engage consultants for planning assistance since the new executive director had extensive experience in planning and could bring a fresh set of eyes to the process.

The grassroots meetings were a departure from the way the agency had created its previous long-range plan. “This time we went directly to the people to engage them in a constructive and creative process,” says Holden. “The credibility we gained as a result was phenomenal—from them and for them in their communities. And, along the way, our legislature learned we were an energized force.”

The staff analyzed the information gathered on a regional basis and constructed the Colorado Arts Plan, which is clustered around six “ends” (major goals) accompanied by a set of six different “means” or interrelated strategic tools: grants, recognition awards, staff services, partnerships, information services, and art in public places programs. The document is a concise twelve pages. Each major goal is followed by a simple grid with three columns for objectives, desired outcomes, and performance measures.

The plan resulted in significant agency changes. Seven former grant programs were consolidated into one integrated program. The agency also became organized more geographically, with staff assigned to regions instead of program areas. In addition to initiating changes, the plan also prepared the agency for a major shift in its own environment—the legislature’s reduction of the agency’s staff by one-third. This, in addition to a decrease in NEA support, became and has continued to be a major planning concern for the agency—the gap between vision and available resources.

The agency considers evaluation and adaptability as going hand in hand. The plan is seen as a “living” document with the flexibility for annual adjustments based on a myriad of evaluation tools (developed with the assistance of a consultant), including grant records, final reports, staff observations and service logs, press analysis, Web site hits, attendance records and surveys. Holden notes, “We tried to use all the evaluation methods initially, but then had to pare down our efforts to a process that is still evolving. Our frustration is that without greater resources we are confined to gathering data on short-term results rather than on long-range systemic change—for that we’d need more staff.”

The plan provides a clear way to evaluate progress toward goals, and to make mid-course corrections based on additional research followed by the development of new initiatives. This was the process that led to a new underserved communities initiative and the creation of an online slide registry of Colorado artists that uses Internet technology.

Partnership emerged as a fundamental value in the plan partly from the realization that resources needed to be stretched, and partly from the move to an integrated agency and staff structure that required generalists instead of program specialists. The CCA works with a number of public and private organizations (Young Audiences of Colorado, Colorado Mountain College, City of Greeley Museums, Four-Mile Historic Park, Western States Arts Federation and others) to maximize arts resources, stretch public dollars and open doors to financial and human resources.

Once the plan was complete, CCA used two methods to get the word out—a special issue of its newsletter was sent to everyone who had participated as well as to legislators and community hosts, and the plan was posted on the agency’s website. Although there is no formal response mechanism built into the plan, the anecdotal feedback has been positive.

Holden is realistic about the limitations of planning. “I’m concerned about expectations that get placed on us as a result of planning, while so much of our world is out of our control and in the hands of the legislature.” She advises other planners by saying, “You can’t take a planning model from one state and replicate it exactly at another. One size does not fit all.”

Maine Arts Commission

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Consider your own state very carefully—where you come from is important.

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“Mainers are known for their ability to find opportunity in adversity, and we have used the fiscal downturn to reevaluate the entire work of the Maine Arts Commission.” So goes a sentence in a report describing the impetus for the long-range strategic planning process that began in 1995 and resulted in The Maine Arts Commission: 1996 and Beyond.Facing a significant loss of its regular funding base, the Maine Arts Commission (MAC) decided to seize the moment as a positive opportunity to completely reimagine its structure, its programs and its relationship with constituents. The eight-month process had the following chronology:

• in-depth analysis by the commission
• hiring of consultants (and staff contact with them throughout the process)
• distribution of a written survey
• commission retreat
• statewide public meetings
• meetings with potential programming partners
• draft of the new agency plan, with solicitation of comments
• six open commission meetings
• commission adoption of the plan

Executive Director Alden Wilson estimates that he committed 50 percent of his time to working on the plan, with Assistant Director Peter Simmons devoting 30 percent and agency program directors spending 10 to 15 percent of their time on planning efforts.Aware of how restructuring might affect the field and public perception of the arts commission, the agency provided many opportunities for interchange and public input. This was done through extensive inclusion in planning and implementing every projected program, and through the creation of program-specific task forces and implementation committees. The implementation committees consist of MAC board members (committee chairs are all commission members and all sit on the commission’s Executive Committee) and field-based constituents, including practicing artists and representatives of affected organizations. Members serve for several years, working out the details of a particular program area in the plan, consulting on guidelines and the review process, evaluating program outcomes and reporting to the Executive Committee and the full commission.

Maine is sparsely populated with the majority of its citizens living in rural settings, so a public process was vital in order to hear from constituents who might not normally be included, and to guarantee that the plan would be specifically designed for Maine. It helped that the agency’s staff have all lived in Maine for a long time and understand the needs of its citizenry. In addition, there was regular consultation with over 20 statewide arts services organizations (e.g., Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, Maine Alliance for Arts Education, Very Special Arts Maine) throughout the planning process.

There was also some data review through written surveys and through examination of prior grant making, which showed the agency that:

• its programs were not aimed at a diverse constituency,
• its programs and episodic grants were not providing or fostering stability, and
• there were whole areas of the state that were not being served.

Armed with this data, the agency created a new vision born partly from the necessities of adversity, partly from an already long-held dissatisfaction with the competitive nature of grant making in some of the programs, and partly from a strong desire to bridge the gap between the grantees and their communities. There was an overarching need to bring into strong alignment the agency’s staff, its commission and the citizens of Maine.With this in mind, the plan made partnerships a priority. One of its seven guiding principles is: “Work collaboratively and promote collaboration in order to increase the effect of the Commission’s resources, and to foster relationships and commitments that build infrastructure beyond the Commission’s involvement.” This principle is now melded with all the agency’s activities, including program guidelines, which ask that applicants refer to the guiding principles in their narratives and show evidence of partnerships.

The agency made sure that artist involvement remained high through regularly canvassing individual artists (as Simmons says, “Maine is a state of artists, more than organizations”), and by making artists central to the plan. In fact, the very first guiding principle of the plan is “…to value artistic quality and cultural diversity.” Artist fellowships became one area where there were no cutbacks in the plan.

In order to ensure flexibility—an absolute necessity in a plan that called for major changes with uncertain outcomes—another guiding principle was, “Be flexible and adaptive in the way the agency functions in order to take advantage of opportunities, to respond to needs more effectively, and to incorporate what it learns from its experience.” As Wilson explains, “We were changing everything, so it couldn’t be done all at once. We had to show in the plan that we’d change programs bit by bit. Each area had several potential outcomes and we need to retain flexibility to explore options over time.”

The agency uses implementation committees to oversee evaluation of progress on all the goals and programs. The planning process helped the agency cultivate a closer working relationship with the legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee and its Appropriations Committee, which in turn has helped with understanding and fulfilling the state’s performance-based budgeting process. Keeping the plan alive is not an issue because of the interlocking relationships between programs with longer lives and therefore longer reporting relationships, plus the strong buy-in from council and staff to maintaining the new vision. The plan is at the center of staff retreats, staff meetings, and committee and council meetings. The structural integration of the plan is the crucial mechanism that keeps it dynamic. “The plan has to be alive because we are still working on it,” explains Wilson.

The plan was disseminated in a number of ways—through direct mail to 3,500 people and organizations, and in an edited version for the agency’s website. But the most effective form has been the inclusion of key components of the plan in the agency’s guidelines, where it is most often seen and read.

One area of difficulty during planning was the potential resistance of some arts organizations to engage in change, especially larger established organizations that had the ear of political figures. But this was a risk worth taking, as the process vastly improved the working relationship between the commission and MAC staff, and ultimately succeeded in making the legislature much more invested in the agency (evidenced by the funding of two major initiatives—arts in education and the New Century Program—representing a 145 percent increase in total appropriations).

Both Wilson and Simmons proffer some advice to others about planning:

• Take a very long view, both backward and forward.
• Build opportunistic qualities into your plan and planning process.
• Consider your own state very carefully—where you come from is important.

Mississippi Arts Commission

Mississippi has a much larger population than Maine, but like its cousin in the Northeast, the majority of its citizens (two-thirds) live in small, rural towns. In order to be as inclusive as possible, the Mississippi Arts Commission in 1996 began a process that reached 910 citizens statewide through a rich array of devices (see opening chart), and led to the creation of the 47-page Mississippians and the Arts: Partnerships for the 21st Century. The agency’s full planning process had the following steps:

• plan to plan
• select consultants
• collect background materials for research questions
• hold staff and commission Planning Committee retreat
• distribute surveys and hold statewide public meetings
• coalesce information
• write draft plan and circulate for comments
• edit and distribute final version of plan

Executive Director Betsy Bradley spent 50 percent of her time on planning-related activities for nine months, and estimates that each of her program staff (who were individually responsible for writing their own sections of the plan) devoted one-third of their time to planning. Bradley explains, “This was a huge commitment of staff time, but I felt strongly that they had to be integrally involved in order to have ownership of the plan.” Although the executive director and staff drove the process, they worked in tandem with both a Planning Committee and Advisory Cabinet of the council (two groups that continue to be close partners with staff).

Mississippi’s plan vision did not change significantly from its previous incarnation, but this time was more informed by extensive regional research and environmental scanning that included looking at economic reports, foundation information, national trends in the arts and nonprofit community, trends in performance-based funding, statistics from the education sector and an extensive evaluation of agency programs. The inclusion of artists was ensured by their extensive involvement in the entire process, and the fact that staff made an effort to attend gatherings of artists and arts service organizations outside of those initiated by the agency.

This groundwork helped the agency to identify four main areas of emphasis:

• developing communities with a rich sense of place
• addressing the challenges a rural state poses for the distribution of resources
• improving the education of the state’s children
• enhancing the image of Mississippi

• Support the development of Mississippi communities through the arts.
• Develop the network of arts providers and the arts industry in Mississippi.
• Strengthen education in and through the arts.
• Increase knowledge of and pride in Mississippi arts and culture.

The plan addresses adaptability by stressing the environment and key issues, more than it does strategies with very specific outcomes. This is done on purpose so that the agency can have the flexibility to be responsive to the environment as it changes. The plan allows for measurability by stating priorities and potential strategies, which then can be translated annually into layers of accountability to satisfy legislative requirements. Although the agency folds evaluation into its ongoing activities, there is a formal report made by staff at the end of every year that outlines the extent to which objectives were achieved.

The collaborative nature of the plan is obvious, since the title itself is Partnerships for the 21st Century. Bradley’s Planning Advisory Cabinet consisted of nineteen leaders from state agencies, statewide service organizations and other partners. In addition, throughout the process the agency approached many of the planning participants as potential partners.

One unusual aspect of the effort in Mississippi is the way the plan has shaped every aspect of agency operations. The entire agency has been restructured to be in perfect alignment with the plan’s goals. Where there were previously twelve grant program areas in the agency, there are now four to match each of the plan’s four major goals. Each goal program area has its own program director, and each program provides operating, project and mini-grant support. The plan has become the decision-making tool for the agency (against which all opportunities and programs are judged) and provides the structure for the agenda of all council meetings.

Bradley cautions that there were some pitfalls along the way, including the low attendance of non-arts constituents at town meetings and the resistance to change by old-guard grantees. Although she hesitates to give advice to others, Bradley does look back at her planning experience and notes some important principles: “Pay attention to your own state and your own culture, and to what works. Do your research in terms of learning wisdom from other fields. And let go of control and power to leverage even more through strategic partnerships.”

New Jersey State Council on the Arts

New Jersey devoted three years—from October 1994 to October 1997—to creating an overarching statewide strategic plan for all the arts. Entitled Arts Plan New Jersey: Toward a Thriving New Jersey, this statewide cultural plan has no end-date and is intended to be “evergreen” for as long as it maintains its relevance. New Jersey’s admirably inclusive planning process eventually encompassed some 2,200 participants statewide, and was created in cooperation with New Jersey Network Foundation (NJN), a long-time partner in arts promotion.

Arts Plan New Jersey is very broad in scope, articulating a vision for the arts in all of New Jersey, and identifying roles that can be played by the state arts agency as well as other cultural organizations. This comprehensive effort provides a framework for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as other cultural agencies in New Jersey, to formulate and adopt individual plans that complement and advance a broader statewide vision.

Although the process was lengthy, it followed a fairly direct route:

• board and staff retreat for plan to plan
• Governor’s Conference on the Arts
• first draft of the plan (including vision, goals and strategies)
• focus groups, mail survey, roundtable discussions and arts education summits
• new draft with strategic actions and accountability measures goes to roundtables
• third draft
• public hearings
• fourth draft followed by a final rewrite
• governor announces statewide arts plan
• council adopts its own complementary plan for the state arts agency

The expense of the overall statewide plan was quite large, some $320,000. Most of this was spent on the launching event, the Governor’s Conference on the Arts—Arts in Focus III: Taking Hold of Our Future ($266,000)—a three-day meeting with 450 participants including leaders from business and industry, the media, education, technology, the arts and government. Most of that budget came from outside sources ($258,000 from corporations, foundations, NJN) plus earned income from registration fees. The funds eventually spent directly by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (on the statewide plan and its own individual agency component) totaled a more modest $53,000 and came primarily from the agency’s annual appropriations spread out over three years.

With an eye toward adaptability, the agency made a conscious decision to apply no end-date to the plan. Instead, the plan presents long-term goals and major statewide strategic objectives. The agency then creates in that context its own long-range plan outlining its leadership roles in achieving Arts Plan along with annual program plans that allow it to make mid-course corrections, and to create a more detailed layer of measures including specific “targets, indicators and baseline data.” To date, this has kept the plan from becoming “so many dusty pages on a shelf.”

The long planning period, plus the numerous contacts with constituents, gave the agency the opportunity to create a vision and a set of goals through a process of give-and-take. As soon as the agency decided on one avenue to pursue, it would hold a public session or a roundtable discussion for feedback, adjust course, and solicit and receive feedback again. Finally, a strong consensus was reached on what became the plan’s central vision with six major goals and eight strategic objectives.

The effort spent on gathering data resulted in two major discoveries. The first was the predominant interest in the issue of arts education. “We were astonished by the relentlessness of this issue on people’s minds,” says Miller. The other surprise was the enthusiasm and willingness of people not formally involved with the agency or the arts to help. Miller cites this as one of the real benefits to opening up the planning process. “So many people said to us, ‘Gosh if you’d just asked me I’d have been happy to….'” This is also one byproduct of planning in a very densely populated state where inescapable proximity nurtures complicated and interconnected relationships.

Therefore, it is no surprise that partnership building became the major cornerstone of the plan, and is the principal means by which the agency develops and administers its programs. “Planning and partnership are our two mantras,” says Miller. With the idea of inclusiveness in mind, the agency also created one of the more clever and unusual aspects to its plan—a clip-out, returnable “endorsement” form. Included as part of the planning brochure, this form has been sent to 48,000 citizens so far and mailings of another 14,000 copies are expected over the next two years.

Readers are also asked to identify two goals and two strategic objectives in which they would like to become involved. Every respondent is added to a database and thereafter receives materials appropriate to the interests identified in the endorsement. The endorsement form was the result of an idea that emerged during the Governor’s Conference, when journalist and Baptist minister Willie Smith encouraged arts leaders to lift a page from the Civil Rights movement and “sign ’em up.” The brochure is one of four versions of the plan. Other versions include an 18-page Plan in-Brief, a 32-page executive reader, and the full document with appendices.

The biggest challenge posed by planning was its complexity and the fact that it was a very labor-intensive process. On the other hand, the agency points to the process itself as the most important element of planning. “Planning brought people together and started to make things happen. It showed the people of New Jersey that we had a new alignment with public purpose and benefit,” explains Miller. “Once the snowball of support began, good things just started happening by themselves.” It is hard to argue with Miller’s assessment, since the galvanized public support and advocacy for the arts initiated by long-range planning led to three consecutive years of increased legislative appropriations for the agency.