Bring it to scale

Bridgespan has released a new report about bringing organizations to scale.   Organization replication and scale is something we tend to forget about when it comes to the arts.   But isn’t the first question we should ask - what is the “right-size” for an organization to accomplish its mission?

The Bridgespan report notes some key challenges for nonprofits in determining and fulfilling scale:

1. Distinguishing promising programs from proven ones is complicated, costly and essential.  Many social service organizations have little if any evidence of their programs’ efficacy. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t producing results. But it does mean we cannot say for certain that they do.
2. Scaling requires rethinking traditional patterns of funding. If we want to make a pervasive impact on our nation’s most difficult problems, we are talking about supporting fewer organizations with larger sums of money. Concentrating resources on a few organizations is rarely how money flows today.
3. Scaling a nonprofit’s programs without investing in its capacity is a recipe for failure. Building organizational and human capacity – putting in place the strategy, systems and, above all else, the right people in the right jobs to convert money into results – is as important a factor in bringing a program successfully to scale as the money itself.
4. Ongoing research, evaluation and performance measurement are imperative as an organization scales. Put simply, there is no other way to ensure that even a well-funded program with proven outcomes will be expanded and sustained. A good idea absent its execution is in fact not a good idea at all.

Last summer at Harvard Business School’s Strategic Perspectives for Nonprofit Managers, we spent a lot of time talking about scale.  This was the first time I really fully explored the concept in terms of the arts and in particular theatre.  In the post, I pointed out four strategies in terms of scale.

1. Get support for fixed costs (and maybe semi-variable costs), and have variable (and maybe or semi-variable) costs covered by earned income.
2. Franchise.
3. Engage in partnerships (or even possibly mergers).
4. Create a subsidiary of a commercial business.

Shouldn’t successful organizations and programs be replicated? What would bringing it to scale mean for theatre? Can we "franchise?" Aren’t co-productions, touring, or moving a show be a type of franchising in the theatre?  Certainly education programs are replicated – it happens naturally more often than not without a strategic plan, but why not plan to replicate and take certain ideas for programming to scale.  In a way the NEA Big Read program is doing exactly that. 

When talking about funding models and whether theatre’s should be saved, if we can talk replication, we have to take mergers under consideration.  For some reason in the arts, mergers are often interpreted as failures.  But consolidation, restructuring, and resource-sharing can be VERY effective for theatre organizations and individual productions, so why not out-right mergers?  Certainly in terms of scale it may make sense for organizations and the community.

We certainly are seeing a form of mergers in co-productions and new play development.   Adrian Ellis wrote in the Art Newspaper that this would be one of the three ways to compensate for the losses in philanthropic, endowment and visitor incomes for museums, “what museums accept they cannot do alone, they will explore doing together more thoroughly and earnestly than in the past: collection sharing, joint acquisitions, pooling conservation resources, and pooling curatorial appointments.”

Without question determining scale is difficult and requires significant examination, but it seems to be an essential step which we don’t take enough time to address and plan.

If you are reading this post via Facebook Notes, please click-thru to Off Stage Right and be counted (and keep reading other posts).