From: deathtothestockphoto.com
If you've ever worked for a non-profit, you know there is always more work to do than time and resources allow. So what you focus on is important. At the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, I have a small department that's responsible for thirteen different brands across seven buildings with eight stages, four galleries, and three restaurants that, last year, hosted over 1,000 nights of arts programming. There's no shortage of things we could be doing. The challenge is deciding what we should be doing. Prioritization can lead to tough decisions and conversations. When one department needs something, it's at the expense of another. A new program or initiative takes time away from an older one. How to balance growth and maintenance internally and across departments is a big question without an easy answer.
I've learned that what's critical is to always focus on the bigger picture. While something might be a good idea in isolation, it needs to be judged by how impactful it is to your overarching goals. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of avoiding "snacking" while at work. First introduced to me through an Intercom blog post, the idea comes from Hunter Walk. The basic idea is to avoid the low-effort, low-impact work in favor of focusing on the high-effort, high-impact work. It's easy to knock the simple tasks off your to-do lists even if they ultimately won't move your work forward in a meaningful way.
Without our venues being live seven days a week, we've had some time to slow down and refocus our work in marketing and communications on some high-effort, high-impact projects. And I wanted to highlight our team's efforts over the past six months.
We've created a new brand book. The work we put into creating new guidelines and standards has already paid off, improving the speed of our design process and the quality and cohesion of the work. We've even been able to do some exciting rebranding for one of our venues we'll share soon.
We've slimmed down our website portfolio from five to three. The sites we've kept were already receiving 80% of our traffic. Now we're providing our guests with a better user experience while reducing the burden on our staff. We've been able to put some of the time we've saved into new features like our exhibition pages for our visual arts program while also planning our move to a more modern theme.
We've started our blog. A natural outgrowth of Soul of the City, more frequent posts allows us to continue to tell the stories of our city's artists and better advocate for them.
We've started the process of moving to a new CRM. Our current CRM does everything we needed it to when it was first implemented three years ago, but it's not growing with us. Over the course of the year, I worked to become a Salesforce certified admin and now am building out our installation department by department.
These projects are long-term, high effort work. But each one will over time amplify our efforts and help us deliver on our mission of building infrastructure for the arts to thrive in St. Louis.