Ep. 05 — Planning the Planning
Planning is crucial for setting goals, prioritizing tasks, and managing time effectively. When done collaboratively with coworkers at your museum, it can be a game changer. In this episode, Amy talks about the impact that planning with your colleagues can have on productivity, and she gives you an agenda you can use for an annual planning workshop for your museum.
Download the FREE planning calendar for museums and use it as a handout at your workshop! (Below in Show Links)
Show Links
Download the People First Framework Guide for Museums: https://bit.ly/4PSguide_lovemymuseum
Download the free planning calendar here: https://bit.ly/2024museumcal
Want to learn more? Check out my website at: www.lovemymuseum.com
You can also join my email list here: https://bit.ly/LMMpodcast_signup
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00]
Planning helps you set clear goals, prioritize tasks, and allocate your time wisely. And let me tell you, planning with your coworkers is a game changer. And something you should be doing at your museum. And that's what we're talking about today. I’m also going to give you exactly how I would talk about this with your staff—like the actual agenda I would use. And I have a free resource you can download that will help you too. So let's get started.
Welcome to the “Love my Museum” podcast. I'm your host, Amy Kehs. And in this episode, we are going to talk about planning. Planning the planning, actually.
Planning is one of my favorite topics, and I have definitely evolved, especially when it comes to planning for work over the last decade. Planning and productivity kind of go hand-in-hand.
[00:01:00]
And we'll talk a little bit about that too. Yogi Berra, the famous baseball catcher said: “If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else.” And I really agree with that. So what kind of planner are you today? And have you evolved, or have you been a different kind of planner in different seasons of your life?
Do you already make goals for the year? Are you ready on January 1st with a list of New Year's resolutions? Or do you just kind of wing it 24/7?
I definitely have been all of the above at one point or another.
And tell me this: What does planning look like for work? And what does planning look like at your museum? I think that planning provides a roadmap for you to follow, whether personally or professionally.
[00:02:00]
Having a roadmap is comforting, right? And like Yogi says, then we all know where we're going. So—what have you planned for work? And what if you made that roadmap for your museum work and (here's my secret) what if everyone at your museum was following the same roadmap?
If you feel like your days are eaten up by never-ending meetings, and at the end of the day or the week or the month, you feel like you're just spinning your wheels, this is the first step to get everyone on the same page to stop this crazy hamster wheel. I've watched a lot of my museum clients struggle with this, so you are not alone.
And I really want to help. Now, I've had some clients that did no planning.
[00:03:00]
And I had some that would plan 5-to-10 years out. One of my favorite clients assigns a theme to each year. And I absolutely love that idea. For some museums, they may be planning at their department level, but not at the museum level. And while that's a good start, it's a good idea to do this at the museum level as well and I'll go into why that is in a minute.
Another problem I see, and I definitely have been guilty of this in my own business, is you make all of these great plans at the beginning of the year but by spring those plans that I made in January were totally out the window. I was too busy. I was wrapped up in the day-to-day to-do's, and my clients were the same way for the most part. They weren't returning to those goals or plans that they had made at the beginning of the year on a consistent basis.
[00:04:00]
And if they were, the plan wasn't always the priority and they would wander or lose sight of the plan as the year and as external demands got louder and louder. I also noticed that important dates or milestones at their museum were not part of the plan, and would often keep them two steps behind or catch them off guard when it came up on the calendar.
As I shared in the first episode, when the pandemic hit, I took some time to work on my own business. And I learned a lot of things that now I use to help my clients. And part of that work was being more proactive and productive, and that meant living those plans that I was creating beyond January. It meant really following through and finding ways to review and revisit those plans consistently and break them down into actionable steps.
[00:05:00]
The research and learning that I did was really helpful, but the game changer for me was an amazing group program that I did with my business coach. She showed us how accumulating routines and recurring tasks and also holding us accountable lead to successful progress on our goals. And do you know what? That year was the best year my business had had in over 20 years.
And I know it was because I stayed focused and I broke things down into actionable steps that I didn't lose sight of throughout the year. And taking a vision for the year and then using that to make goals for each quarter worked really well.
I want to teach museums how to do this.
And we'll talk a lot about this on the podcast, but today we're going to talk about just the first step, that overview of the year.
[00:06:00]
The planning the planning. So this overview of the year is a discussion of that 30,000-foot view. Ideally, you meet with your entire staff, but this might take some adjusting depending on the size of your museum and how many staff you have.
But either way, everyone will be represented at this discussion. And everyone is coming prepared to this talk. Think of this as less of a meeting and more of a workshop and brainstorming session. You want to make sure that people have a chance to contribute beforehand and learn the results afterwards. Okay. So now get out your pen and paper, because I'm going to tell you the agenda for this annual planning workshop.
The first thing that you will start talking about in your planning workshop is your museum's mission, vision, and values.
[00:07:00]
This is going to set the stage for the work that you're about to do. It's going to start to get everyone into that mindset that they're considering the entire museum brand for this exercise. So go over the mission, vision, and values.
These are words that, internally, everyone should already know. It should be something that you talk about so often, and they're living and breathing these elements and they feel so proud to be there. These things are also things that you might share with your external audiences. But even if you don't say these words specifically to your external audiences, they should feel them deeply and maybe even be able to guess based on the work you do or how it feels to visit your museum. If you don't have a mission, vision, and values for your museum, start brainstorming that.
[00:08:00]
These things are essential to your museum's brand messaging.
The second thing is to go over the key messages for your museum. Key messages are the center of your brand messaging. I love brand messaging. And we'll talk about it a lot. What are the two to three messages that run deep in everything that you do, again, just like mission, vision, and values?
This is to get everyone in the right headspace and thinking about the museum as a brand and as a whole for the work that you're about to do, so that they're not just focused on their department or their team or themselves, but they're thinking about the whole museum for this exercise.
The third thing I want you to go over before we dive into the real work, are the different audiences that your museum serves.
[00:09:00]
Usually a department is most likely just dealing with one audience. So it's good to remind everyone that there are a lot of different audiences to consider. For example, visitor services. Your main audience are the people who walk through the door. And if you're in the fundraising department, your audience is focusing on potential donors. Or your current board members. Government relations, if you have someone that does that, you're working with community leaders and government officials. And the communications office is usually the one that is thinking about all of the different audiences. But usually even they are focused on media relations or on potential visitors and getting them to visit for the first time.
[00:10:00]
Okay, now that we're thinking in that mindset, we're thinking like a museum, like the whole museum, going to work together to map out your year.
Now don't forget at this point that we're still looking at it from a 30,000 foot view. We're not going to get into the nitty gritty of the how or the why. This is just an overview. Remember my client that uses that yearly theme? That's a great idea to take out some decision fatigue and also really create great brand awareness and consistency when you're promoting your exhibits and your programs to your audiences.
So what are the main things happening for your upcoming year? Do you have a new exhibit? Any anniversaries or milestones that you need to recognize or celebrate? What are the big programs or events that you maybe do every year or that maybe go with the theme or exhibits that you're working on?
[00:11:00]
It is important to lay these things out when everyone is in the room. If this seems overwhelming, then download my free museum planning calendar. The link is in the show notes, and it has over 100 ideas and prompts and a lot of room to plan out your year.
It's important for everyone to hear what is on the horizon, and which of these priorities are for everyone. Every department will be working towards these goals. It makes me so sad when I see different departments working so hard and other departments not supporting them. And usually that's because they have different priorities. So everyone ends up asking each other for support, but everyone is a bit resentful because they have their own priorities and they don't have room on their plate for anything else.
[00:12:00]
And so if everyone has the same priorities, they know in advance how they can support each other, because as you will hear me say over and over again, the end goal for everyone is the same.
You want people to come to your museum and fall in love with your museum so they come back and bring a friend.
If everyone is on the same page, then you won't be making things hard on your coworkers, and you'll be working together. Doesn't that sound nice? Not to work in a vacuum, not to work against each other.
It leads to burnout when we work that way. And it leads to people leaving. And honestly it will translate to your visitors. Stressed museum staff don't relate well to the visitors walking through your doors.
[00:13:00]
And so if they feel some ownership, and if they know why your museum is important, they can pass that on to the visitors. We want museums to thrive, and this is one of the first steps to getting everyone on the same page and working towards a common goal.
You're just mapping it out, remembering and knowing what you have coming up and what priorities are for each part of the year, for each quarter of the year. This idea of everyone having a common goal should be pretty straightforward, but it is definitely the biggest problem I see in museums. Especially since the pandemic. And museum workers are exhausted because they feel like everyone at their museum is working in a different direction.
I went to a really great museum conference last year and talked to a lot of museum professionals who told me stories about how this was affecting their work and their love for their job and their love for their museum.
[00:14:00]
People feel like they're spinning their wheels and either nothing's getting done or the work feels harder than it should, and so this annual planning workshop is going to start to help to clear this up.
So what happens next? What happens after the workshop? Everyone should leave knowing exactly what the vision for the year is, exactly what the priorities are for the year, and how they fit into that plan. And everyone will go back to their department and take with them that complete big picture.
They also have that mission, vision, and values of the museum fresh in their minds, and they have those key messages that they can weave into the work they do. And they have this overview of the year that highlights the museum's priorities.
[00:15:00]
Now they meet as a team and they map out the work that they have to do to make those priorities happen. What is their part? What does the timeline look like for these projects? What information do they need from their coworkers, and when should they ask so they give their coworkers ample time to pull the information together?
At the team level, we are now going to take that vision of the year and break it down into four 12-week quarters.
That will eventually get broken down into monthly and weekly, etc. In future episodes we'll talk about how you run a dream team and how these plans are divvied up among team members. But for now, just know that a version of this is also going to show up in the form of a weekly agenda so that you're checking in on these priorities every week.
[00:16:00]
Okay. Now let's go back to your planning calendar for a minute.
I want to highlight some of the things that you should consider during your planning workshop, and maybe they will help as you talk to your team about ideas for the year. Again, download the free calendar for museums. It has a page for every month of the year with some ideas and prompts on what you need to be thinking about for that month. The calendar, I hope, keeps you relevant and newsworthy and will hook your audience.
It is by no means an exhaustive list though. There are “holidays”— I'm putting that in air quotes—for everything now. So think about your collection and programs and your mission. What are some of these holidays that can go with those things to give you an opportunity to educate and celebrate that mission or things in your collection?
[00:17:00]
Second, look at the past. Another great resource is looking at past exhibits and programming. Was there something that did really well? Should you do it again? Can you improve it? Maybe a lecture that you could make into a series. Or a program that did really well that maybe could be turned into an exhibit. And vice versa.
I think every museum needs to think of themselves as a community museum if they want to thrive. So how can you support the community? Can you honor someone with an annual award? Can you plan an event for families? Maybe you're the go-to place for a Halloween party or another celebration. If you start having consistent, reliable, and timely programs, you'll gain some public relations traction in your community and you'll become known for those things.
[00:18:00]
Third, I want you to take a look back at this year and think if there were things that came up that caught you and your team off guard. Can you plan for it this year? And when you're working on this planning, don't forget that you should also map out timelines and deadlines as well, and share those with the team along with some of the reasoning behind the timelines, that these timelines aren't arbitrary.
For example, as a communications professional, I cannot tell you how many times in the last 30 years I had a coworker come up and asked me why they weren't on “XYZ” TV show or in “XYZ” magazine. And my answer had to be because that deadline was six months before you told me about the thing that you wanted to be promoted. So planning together also gives great insight into how others do their job and the support that they need from their colleagues.
[00:19:00]
The other thing that this planning can do for the museum's leadership team is to see the big events in that 30,000 foot view. Are there big projects that are too close together? Is the schedule going to burn out your staff or exhaust your resources? We should all be thinking of that common goal, of that big picture. And your planning should start with that big vision for your museum, and then from that master plan, branch off to include what that planning and what those goals mean for your team and even your own career. After you've gone through all these things, this should have everyone really excited and inspired. And so while those creative juices are flowing, jot down some ideas for the next year or maybe a three-year, five-year, or ten-year vision. I hope this was really helpful.
[00:20:00]
Go ahead and download the free calendar and please share the link with your colleagues. That's it for today. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.
