As someone who’s worked in museums and arts institutions in the US, Australia and Europe, I can confidently say that siloed working is a ubiquitous experience for arts workers around the world. It’s something I see our hard working clients try to navigate on a daily basis, and I’ve talked previously about how siloed working is holding us back: ‘staying in our lane’ hinders innovative thinking and gets in the way of providing a truly audience-focused experience.
Emerging from a time where arts organizations had more traditional roles, many organizations are currently set up with deliberately isolated departments, with little co-departmental working. This leads to inefficiencies, a diluted shared purpose and even poor morale. With the current climate of political divisions, external pressure and sometimes internal dissent on current issues – it has never been more important for arts organizations to be working as a truly unified team towards a common goal.
But what can be done? I’d like us to look at the shared characteristics of organizations who are trying to break down the silos in their workplaces, and challenge you to try some of these in your own teams.
#1 They utilize cross-departmental audience steering groups Many organizations we work with, while they work in traditional departments (such as marketing, development, education and exhibitions) create cross-departmental groups that have audiences at their heart. The aim of these groups is to ensure all departments have a voice on key audience initiatives. This enables easy, prompt communication and also ensures that no single department is unequally ‘burdened’ with audience development.
#2 They have a vision that everyone can see themselves in The single most obvious sign of a siloed organization is a top-down leadership style: strategic goals and your cultural vision is set by C-suite executives only, and ‘transmitted’ down to teams as a broadcast, not an exchange. An alternative approach to strategic planning, and one that is seeing real success at President Lincoln’s Cottage, is a more involving, collaborative process – one that ensures all staff can have their say in their future. The result is empowered teams working together, galvanized by a shared purpose.
#3 They collect insight that benefits every department Audience research has historically been relegated to either the marketing or learning department as their responsibility. As a result, the questions can sometimes skew to be focused on things these teams are interested in. This leaves other departments out in the cold, left to rely on assumptions and hypotheses about their audiences instead of hard data.
When other departments are brought into the mix when conducting audience research, truly powerful and impactful change can occur. Brooklyn Museum has been using our rolling research program, Visitor 360 for nearly a year, and as a result of making sure departments like membership, F&B, retail, visitor experience, exhibitions and public safety (and many more!) were included, they’ve been able to use the insights gathered to make changes to their F&B offer, onsite experience and approach to communications to respond to audience feedback.
#4 They have a shared language to use to talk about audiences We’ve worked with organizations in the past who have one segmentation system for their programming team, one for their development team, another for their marketing team and another for their visitor experience team! Not only is it incredibly inefficient (and expensive!) to have so many different systems, it can contribute to siloed working as it further isolates teams as they can’t talk to each other in ‘the same language’ about their audience and their goals. Organizations that instead have one, meaningful way to look at and engage with their audiences thrive. Segmentation, such as Culture Segments, can be incredibly useful to provide one shared language across departments.
#5 There are clear, common goals and measures of success Similar to how visions have historically been set at a leadership level, so too have KPIs and measures of success. Setting these collaboratively, clearly linked to shared ambitions of the organization, like we did with the M+ team, can go a long way in ensuring teams are truly working together to achieve the same shared goal.
#6 They use an integrated CRM Like segmentation systems, it’s common to see organizations with multiple databases (does ‘our ticketing team uses Salesforce, our email team uses MailChimp, our membership team uses Razor’s Edge’ ring a bell?), and again, this can lead to further isolation and inefficiencies. Investing in one integrated CRM across departments, like Tessitura, will help organizations to seamlessly communicate with donors, ticket-buyers and even educators through one platform.
From strategy and mission to internal effectiveness – MHM has delivered game-changing results for arts and culture organizations at every level. To discuss how we can help your organization, get in touch with our US Director Alexa Magladry.
