Strategy Development for a Small Non-Profit
Fused Muse Ensemble is a musical group that aims to increase awareness of local & global concerns through new artistic works. The group was in the early stages of a new project with another local non-profit working with LGBT homeless youth, and they wanted advice on how to engage the community and increase awareness of the project and their organization.
Snapshot
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Employed ethnographic research methods to observe the groups working process
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Synthesized data from over 90 pages of observation notes
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Interviewed non-profit organizations to identify any strategies or themes driving their success, and conducted competitive analysis
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Redesigned the organization's website
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Delivered a strategy to the non-profit for achieving organizational sustainability
What was the problem?
Fused Muse had been successful in past artistic projects, but they wanted to grow their organization to the point that it could remain sustainable. Their original plan was to develop a multi-media website that would provide resources to those who were homeless while engaging the community and growing their organization.
My partner and I first addressed why a site such as this would be benefitting a homeless audience. We also worked to understand the organization from within, we spoke with other successful non-profits, and through listening and observing, we identified strategies that would help this organization achieve it's goal.
How did we solve it?
Discovery - Observations and Interviews
In our discovery phase, my partner and I sat in a number of initial group meetings with the artistic directors and a number of musicians and dancers who would be a part of the upcoming project. We conducted these observations in order to better under how the group was recruiting local talent, how they were able to attract otherwise very business artists, and successfully collaborate with such a diverse team. We identified a number of areas where improved communication could have helped the organization reach it's goal of outreach among the local artistic community.
We also conducted 5 interviews with non-profits who were successful in raising money, reaching out to the community, and remaining sustainable as organizations. We identified some very strong themes when talking to these groups, and we were able to wrap these themes into a final strategy for our client. We synthesized data from over 90 pages, looking for specific themes or common drivers of these organization's success.
We learned through our observations and interviews that FME didn't need an elaborate website to reach their goals, they needed a strategy for fundraising, a more cohesive online presence, and a defined path forward for their organization. What we did next was map out an organization journey map.
Before this FME knew they had a lot of work to do before they'd be the type of organization they wanted to be, but they had no idea what came next for them. This journey map provided an incredible amount of clarity for them. Part of the reason this map is not organized linearly is because no two organizations are the same. There are however certain barriers that a non-profit has to scale before moving onto bigger challenges.
We tied our themes from our interviews to this journey to show the client which steps in the journey they should take to achieve specific goals. An example of this can be seen below. Credibility to an organization like this could mean a number of things depending on the audience. Artists and donors look at different things when determining credibility. It was important for FME to communicate to artists and donors, in different ways, that they were a credible organization worth their time.
To help our client achieve this credibility with their online presence, we completed a full redesign of the organization's website. We first conducted a competitive analysis to understand what other successful non-profits were doing to tell their story, to market their events, and to reach donors. We then used what we learned from our discovery phase and synthesis to inform a redesign that we thought would help the organization reach it's goals.
Through the redesign we hoped to keep the organization mission front and center, to personalize the organization, and to better facilitate donations from all levels.
What was the result?
I'm proud to say that Fused Muse Ensemble now maintains an active presence online, and their latest artistic production was a hit! They also followed our strategic outline and started soliciting help from season committees.