From the Field

Elements of Strategic Planning

The Bridgespan Group has published an article advising on strategic planning. How Nonprofits and NGOs Can Get Real Value from Strategic Planning shares four vital elements to strategic planning: clarifying strategy, setting strategic priorities, estimating resources and planning implementation. These four elements are key to decision making and realizing value. Each element is accompanied by an example of an organization using it in its strategic planning.

Asset Based Community Development for Museums

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is a framework that focuses on the strengths and assets of a community—such as individuals, associations, institutions, physical space, exchange, and culture/stories/history—to drive positive change. Museums can adopt ABCD to shift their paradigm from being deficit based, in which they attempt to solve community problems through outreach but often disempower communities, to asset based. The framework enables museums to achieve this goal of catalyzing communities by identifying and building on community assets, fostering partnerships with community members, and empowering communities’ decision making and problem solving. Susan Longhenry’s blog on the American Alliance of Museums website discusses the benefits of using ABCD in museums and provides an example of how one museum has changed the way it approaches its work.

Social Impact Museum Toolkit

The Utah Division of Arts & Museums and Thanksgiving Point Institute have released their Social Impact Museum Toolkit, a new resource to assist museums in collecting and analyzing social impact data. The toolkit builds on three years of social impact research across 38 museums to provide best practices for implementing a social impact survey and designing a social impact study. Results from the original three-year study suggest that the social survey tool was a valid measurement system and that museums have a positive impact on visitors’ learning, engagement, health and well-being, relationships, and valuing of diverse communities.