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

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. 

Young Associates is hiring!

Young Associates is looking for a new administrator, associate, and senior associate. Please visit our Careers page to view the current job posting. 

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. 

2015 Summer Seminars Announced

You spoke and we listened! We've brought together some of our most popular seminars with new, highly requested, training opportunities. From budgeting and cashflow to data management and software know-how. Join the team at Young Associates for two days of professional development gems! These seminars are small, intimate sessions that allow you to have meaningful discussion with fellow colleagues in the not-for-profit and charitable sector. Bring your laptop and work through samples and templates, and leave with tips, tricks, new skills and strengthened skills. There's something for everyone from board and senior management to entry level staff. 

Join us July 6th and 7th at the NEW Young Associates training centre.

Book by June 15th with the coupon code summer2015 to receive $15.00 off each seminar.

Check out our seminars here.

Samantha Zimmerman talks ‘smart data’ to Arts Consultants Canada

DATA SMART: More Than “Show me the Money.”

By Samantha Zimmerman, Practice Manager, Senior Associate & Data Management Consultant (Young Associates)
Originally published in the May 2014 ACCA e-bulletin

We’ve all heard about data: the importance of data; the need to keep data safe; the value of turning raw data into actionable information. But what does it mean for our clients? Most organizations are already comfortable making strategic decisions based on their financial data, because GAAP provides guidelines for maintaining financial data so that it is viewed as SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely); but what about our statistical data? Not only is there no one set of rules for dealing with statistical data, there are also privacy laws that dictate how we must collect, store and use data. It can all be very overwhelming.

The arts sector must also conform to CADAC which requires our clients to analyze and report their statistical and financial data to Government funders. CADAC and its partner funders across the country are becoming more rigorous and demanding in reconciling and verifying statistical data, which makes it even more important for organizations to properly track the necessary data required for CADAC reporting. More and more, clients have been reaching out to Young Associates in search of either full service data entry and processing, or targeted data management support with assistance in collecting data, pulling and reviewing periodic reports (monthly, annual), and reconciliation with bookkeeping software, as well as staff training or prospect research.

There is so much potential for data collection, but the majority of small and mid-size not-for-profit organizations often lack the human resources, the technology/software packages or the time to deal with all the data. We’ve all seen those organizations that are tracking their donations, event attendance and other lists in Excel spreadsheets. Much of the data stored in these Excel spreadsheets lives independently from other organizational data, and many of the lists lack standardization in the collection and presentation of the data.

While most of us are using Excel adequately, the majority will never use it to its full potential. Generally it’s seen as a tool for tracking static data; a moment in time, an individual project, or small pieces of information from a single cycle. How many years has a patron attended that event? How many donors are attending our events as well, and vice versa, are program participants returning as supporters? Young Associates has developed a proven system for helping organizations determine their data goals, and develop systems that work within the means of the organization to collect and analyze the data that gives the true picture. Where the mindset needs to change is not thinking of those Excel spreadsheets as a moment in time, but as a piece of a larger picture. Just as the financial information of the organization tells a story, the statistical data of an organization also has a story to tell.