Tis the season (for grant deadlines)!

With grant deadlines galore falling in the winter and early spring, many arts managers are poring over budgets and reports for funders – while at the same time juggling the demands of artistic programming in full swing.

These can feel like “weeks of reckoning” where you’re justifying your existence to grantors while working like crazy to maximize today’s successes.

If you’re run off your feet and wondering why you chose this crazy business, check out this short excerpt from Finance for the Arts in Canada, which may help provide some perspective on budgeting an the real world:

The ability to stick to a budget is held as an important benchmark: it’s senseless to invest a lot of time and energy into a plan that’s going to be discarded the moment things change. However, rigid management stifles creativity, and extreme meticulousness can produce needless bureaucracy. The degree of rigour beneficial to a given company depends on factors such as its size and complexity, the risk inherent in its programming (e.g., a choreographic workshop or artist-run centre may need more flexibility than a classical ballet company or major art museum), the skill level of decision-makers, and the attitudes and preferences of the leadership.

Managers are expected to know how to implement a budget (that is, to follow the script, as it were, by setting activities in motion, making the planned purchases and generating the targeted revenues). A complementary expectation is that managers will have the “chops” to manage change while maintaining stability. No year goes fully according to plan — not ever! When confronted by the unexpected, leaders are expected to step up and decide what to do next. These expectations, by the way, come from all directions. Volunteer board members look to paid managers for expertise. Senior staff look to the director for coordination, and more junior staff to managers for specific instruction on what to do.

When you take on a financial management role, you agree not only to balance the demands of a script (your budget) against the exigencies of daily life (the improv element), but also to do so while responding to the expectations of colleagues, your employer (the board) and perhaps other stakeholders. With so many factors at play, it is clear that to thrive, an organization needs more than a skilled manager, it needs recognized and shared processes that provide a framework for adapting to circumstances. In the absence of functional collaboration amongst staff members and between the board and staff, the best financial manager can be thwarted. A productive combination of smarts and structure equips the organization to move forward. An outcome may differ from expectations, but if there’s general agreement that contingencies were handled as well as possible, then the result may be considered a success.

From Finance for the Arts in Canada, Volume 2: Financial Management; Chapter 4: Managing Successfully Throughout the Year

Toronto's New Culture Plan

Toronto is taking a significant step towards fostering a vibrant cultural landscape with its ambitious 10-year plan to invest in arts and culture. A CBC news article provides an overview of the new culture plan: Toronto reveals 'ambitious' plan to invest in arts and culture over next decade

This plan aims to double funding for local arts service organizations, expand cultural spaces, and make arts and culture accessible to all residents. By supporting diverse communities, artists, and cultural organizations, the city seeks to strengthen its position as a global cultural hub. We are thrilled to see this important investment in local arts and culture.

Young Associates can assist organizations in this sector in navigating the financial complexities of budgeting as government programs and priorities change. Consider purchasing Finance for the Arts in Canada to gain deeper insights into the financial strategies that can drive cultural growth.

New Seminars! Take the Lead: Principles for Administrative Leadership in the Arts

Young Associates is thrilled to be partnering with WorkInCulture to launch Take the Lead: Principles for Administrative Leadership for the Arts, a new two day seminar series for increasing managerial and governance skills in arts administration. Running October 12 & 13, 2017, instructors from Young Associates and WorkInCulture will deliver sessions on understanding financial statements, payroll, WSIB, and HR. Get more details here. 

Mission, Vision, Values, Mandate: an “Aha!” Moment

Staff Post
By Heather Young

In addition to being Principal at Young Associates, I am also a proud member of Arts Consultants Canada / Consultants Canadiens en arts, as are my colleagues Samantha Zimmerman, Anna Mathew, and Jerry Smith. I was privileged to be part of ACCA’s most recent strategic planning retreat, in my capacity as outgoing treasurer. Twelve of us, the current board plus “graduating” directors, shared a day of focused discussion and more than a few bursts of laughter, engaging in a three-year planning process.

As I expect many of us have done with strat planning clients, we began with a review of ACCA’s mission, vision and values. I confess that I’ve always been a little hazy on how to delineate those terms, especially when mandate is added to the mix – so I was relieved that we spent a few minutes confirming a common set of definitions.

At last, it all makes sense!

Mission captures the practical, desired outcome: what should happen because of what we do? Who are we serving, and who benefits from our work? It is an expression of structure, and appeals to the head – our rational side.

The vision is aspirational. It’s a dream that may or may not come true. Captured in a brief, inspiring sentence – think postcard, not novel – it appeals to the heart. 

Values are the principles that guide our actions: the compass that helps ensure we stay on the right track.

As for mandate, there was a small difference of views. Some would see it as synonymous with mission. Another view positions it as a legal term that captures our relationship with the government. This makes complete sense to me: for most organizations, the mandate statement in their articles of incorporation or letters patent is drier and more general than the directive they articulate for their strategic plan.

Remember Star Trek?

Well, the vision of the Federation might run something like, “that humanity achieve a more complete understanding of itself through exploring the universe.”

The five-year mission is articulated in Captain Kirk’s iconic opening narration: “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

The values, embodied in the Prime Directive, have inspired endless discussion in fan literature to this day, as a quick Google search will confirm!

And, I expect that somewhere within the files of the Federation’s legal department we could find a mandate statement, couched in formal terms, capturing all of the above from a governance standpoint.

As for ACCA, we had a productive and exciting day that yielded renewed mission and vision statements for the association. ACCA has now released the final version:

VISION:

Arts Consultants Canada / Consultants canadiens en arts (ACCA) members are valued contributors in a thriving, creative Canada.
 
Les membres de Arts Consultants Canada / Consultants canadiens en arts  (ACCA) contribuent au rayonnement d'un Canada créatif et florissant.
 

MISSION:

ACCA strengthens the arts in Canada by connecting a network of experts with Canada’s arts community and by encouraging the active exchange of its members’ expertise to advance and promote the development of the sector.
 
L’ACCA renforce les arts au Canada en raccordant un réseau d’expert(e)s au  secteur artistique canadien ainsi qu’en encourageant un échange actif d’expertise parmi ses membres pour favoriser le secteur.

Read more about the ACCA Strategic Plan here. 

Read about the Canada Council's new funding model here

In December, the Canada Council published their newly redesigned  funding model, with which they hope:

...to more strategically support the creation and wide dissemination of excellent Canadian artworks, to more directly and efficiently support Canadian artists, and to more flexibly and effectively support the development of a diversity of high performing arts organizations.

A year ago, the council announced its plan to move away from its pre-existing model, one which was based around artistic discipline, and streamline its funding structure with a goal to more effectively serve grantees and the arts community. The new model is composed of six new programs:

• Creating, Knowing, and Sharing: The Arts and Cultures of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples
• Explore and Create
• Engage and Sustain
• Supporting Artistic Practice
• Arts Across Canada
• Arts Abroad

You can access information about the six new programs, their objectives, candidate and entrance activity requirements, the maximum grant allowance, application deadlines and assessment criteria  here: newfundingmodel.canadacouncil.ca and you can email the Canada Council at info@canadacouncil.ca or call them at 613-566-4414, ext. 5060 if you have questions.

Anna Mathew talks to ACCA about the role of the information manager in the arts

Empowering Arts Organizations in an Information Age

By Anna Mathew, Knowledge Associate (Young Associates)
Originally published in the February 2015 ACCA e-bulletin

Technically, I’m a librarian. So why have I joined Arts Consultants Canada?

Well, I work for Young Associates, a team of consultants working primarily with arts organizations in a variety of areas, most significantly financial and data management. I believe the field of library science - now more frequently referred to as information science, information studies, or even just ‘information’, has broad applications to sectors beyond the public, academic, school, and traditional corporate (e.g. legal and medical) settings to which we are accustomed. The information specialist is no longer restricted to within the library walls and now frequently finds him/herself in an embedded role within an organization which has a non-information related mandate but needs someone to perform information retrieval and information management duties to support that mandate. What I’m saying is, in our ‘information age’, a librarian can find him or herself working anywhere.

It’s no surprise that we don’t come across too many arts organizations who can afford to keep a permanent, embedded information specialist on staff. Sure, some of the larger organizations have a researcher or two, but for the most part, arts organizations have too much administrative overload and too many budget constraints to deal with to consider creating a formalized role for an information manager. Enter the arts consultant.

In the Spring 2014 ACCA newsletter, my Young Associates colleague Samantha Zimmerman wrote about how consultants can play a leadership role in getting arts organizations to consider their statistical data as ‘SMART’ data, and to set goals and put systems in place to make data part of a larger picture in preserving and communicating an organization’s story. That sentiment is echoed by Negin Zebarjad, a consultant at Nordicity, a consulting firm that earlier this month hosted a panel for Artscape Launchpad on “The Power of Data on Communicating Your Impact”. Zebarjad focuses on good design and clear goal-setting, and emphasizes that arts organizations need to become aware of what data they are already collecting and think about how it can be threaded into the narrative they want to tell about themselves. During the panel, representatives from major funding bodies stressed the importance of seeing a balance of qualitative and quantitative information from organizations when assessing impact. Smartly organized data - which is collected, preserved, analysed, and presented according to well-designed systems and in support of clearly articulated goals - makes that qualitative-quantitative balance possible; this is becoming more relevant as CADAC is looking for correlations between the financial and the statistical data they receive.

The information specialist’s role in consulting with arts organizations goes beyond accessing and manipulating a client’s database. We can offer arts organizations assistance in understanding how information moves through their organizational ecosystems and how it is affected by software, hardware, and, most importantly, people. By undertaking strategic exercises like organizational data flow visualizations and goal setting, and hands on activities like database design and cleanup, we can increase efficiency and strengthen identity.

A favourite instructor at the University of Toronto’s iSchool said: “A librarian helps people find stuff”. (Full disclosure, he might not have used the word ‘stuff’). Another memorable instructor put forth a ‘cocktail party’ definition for the term information architect (a kind of information specialist) as someone who: “is supposed to make sure that people can find what they’re looking for without getting lost or confused.”

Arts consultants armed with information skills can do both those things by helping organizations become information literate and empowering their stakeholders to use that information to operate efficiently, to advance their mandates, and to extend their reach.