Case Study: Strategic Planning for Arts & Culture Nonprofit

Find Out…

The Challenge

The Muhammad Ali Center is one of Louisville’s most iconic arts and culture nonprofits—home to a museum devoted to Muhammad Ali’s life and legacy, and a hub for educational programming rooted in his core principles and humanitarianism.

As calls for racial and social justice increased across Louisville, particularly following the murder of Breonna Taylor, the Center was called upon not only as a cultural institution but also as a moral voice and gathering place for people committed to equity and community healing. However, the organization had not clearly defined its strategy for serving in such wide-ranging capacities.

At the same time, the Center faced challenges common to many arts and culture organizations:

• Operating a wide array of exhibits, programs, and events with a lean staff and budget

• Clarifying its unique role within a shifting cultural and social justice landscape

• Strengthening its financial model to ensure sustainability

The Center partnered with Prosper Strategies to engage to develop a strategic plan that would:

• Engage and respond to a broad and diverse range of stakeholders

• Clarify its purpose and future role

• Identify the highest-impact strategic priorities

• Shore up its financial foundation
• Establish systems to ensure the plan would be implemented—not sit on a shelf

People

Our approach to strategic planning for arts & culture nonprofits centers around the Shared Power™ philosophy, which redistributes the power to shape strategy to the people most impacted by it. With that in mind, our strategic planning process for The Muhammad Ali Center began where it always begins: with People.

Engaging the right stakeholders

Working with the Center, we identified a diverse and representative group of stakeholders to involve in strategic planning, including:

• Staff

• Board members

• Museum visitors

• Youth program participants

• Community partners and civic leaders

Multiple, meaningful ways to participate

To ensure the plan reflected community needs and perspectives, we used a multi-pronged engagement process that included:

• Strategic planning committees made up of staff, board members and program participants

• Surveys for staff, board, visitors, and program participants

• Stakeholder interviews

• Youth and community listening sessions

• Opportunities for all stakeholders to review and respond to draft components of the strategic plan

Three lenses on the Center’s reality

To build a clear picture of the organization’s current state, we conducted three key assessments—essential components of effective strategic planning for arts & culture nonprofits:

1. Stakeholder Assessment – How stakeholders view the Center’s strengths, challenges, and future role.

2. Organization Assessment – Review of programs, operations, finances, and internal capacity.

3. Ecosystem Assessment – Analysis of comparable cultural institutions, funding models, and emerging trends.

These assessments were then shared with the strategic planning committees to get everyone on the same page as we entered into mission, vision and strategic pillar work.

Key insights from the research included:

• Stakeholders expected the Center to play a prominent role in racial and social justice, not just operate as a museum.

• The Center was delivering more programming with fewer resources than many other arts and culture institutions.

• Long-term financial sustainability needed to be a major strategic priority for the organization to survive and sustain its impact.

These findings set the foundation for the strategic direction that followed.

Strategy

With strong alignment from the strategic planning committees on stakeholder data and organizational insights, we entered the Strategy phase of Prosper’s Nonprofit Strategy System™—a critical stage in any strategic planning process for arts and culture nonprofits.

Defining the Center’s Reason for Being

During a collaborative strategic planning retreat with both board and staff members, participants aligned on a powerful “Reason for Being,” an internal statement that explains the unique impact only their organization can make:

The Muhammad Ali Center mobilizes Muhammad Ali’s legacy to advance social justice.

This purpose comes to life through:

• Collections and exhibits that inspire reflection and learning

• Programs, partnerships, and events that activate Ali’s principles among people of all ages

• A role as a brave space and community bridge-builder in Louisville and beyond

The Center’s vision, mission, and values were refined to reflect this purpose and align with Ali’s life principles.

Ultimately, we arrived at the following refined statements:

Vision: A just and compassionate world where people can reach their greatness.

Mission: Mobilize Muhammad Ali’s legacy to foster respect, inspire generations of changemakers and advance social justice.

With fidelity to Ali’s legacy, the planning teams chose to maintain his six core principles as their core values. However, we updated the descriptions of those principles to reflect the role of the center and guide the professional decisions of staff and board members. This included adding real-world examples of how the core principles were already playing out in the daily operations of the Center.

Setting clear strategic pillars

Together with the strategic planning committee and broader stakeholders, we then identified four strategic pillars to guide the Center’s future:

1. Ensure Muhammad Ali’s legacy lives on for generations by establishing financial sustainability through a $6M annual operating budget.
2. Center the organization’s work in advancing racial and social justice, guided by Muhammad Ali’s life and legacy.
3. Optimize the physical space to create a best-in-class cultural destination founded on compelling storytelling and visitor experience.
4. Unlock the power of our people.

While the pillars may appear simple and straightforward, the process of arriving at them was thoughtful and deliberate. During the strategic planning retreat, we led the planning committees through a series of exercises to brainstorm hundreds of strategic questions the Center would need to answer over the next three years, group and categorize those questions into potential plan pillars, and then narrow them down to the most essential areas of focus using a tool called the Eisenhower Matrix.

The pillars that resulted reflect best practices in strategic planning for arts & culture nonprofits: they are clear, actionable, future-focused, and most importantly, research and stakeholder-informed. They clearly answer the directives uncovered in research: to shore up the Center’s financial foundation, to take a firm stand on racial and social justice, and to optimize the Center’s resources in service of its mission.

Progress

The Progress phase of our strategic planning process ensured the Muhammad Ali Center’s new strategic plan would become an operational reality.

Building objectives, key results, and accountability

Prosper led workshops with the Center’s team to:

• Translate strategic pillars into Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), each with a clear owner

• Assign ownership for each objective

• Build an OKR dashboard and activity planning tools

• Establish a steady meeting cadence for accountability to the strategic plan

We also helped the Center turn its three-year strategic plan into a one-year implementation roadmap, ensuring momentum from day one, and an external plan overview for donors, funders and the community.

This essential part of arts & culture nonprofit strategic planning positions organizations to move swiftly from vision to execution.

Results

Within the first year of implementation, the Center achieved notable results:

Financial Sustainability

• Closed the year with a $2 million budget surplus, advancing toward the long-term $6M annual goal.

Expanded Racial & Social Justice Impact

• Grew DEI and anti-racism workshops

• Founded the Association for Teaching Black History in Kentucky

• Launched a new digital Learning Hub

• Partnered with the Racial Healing Project to deepen community healing initiatives

Facility Enhancements

• Secured $1 million in funding to replace the Center’s escalator

• Partnered with the American Alliance of Museums on a Collections and Preservation Assessment

Strengthened Organizational Culture

• Engaged a consultant to support staff and culture shifts

• Increased intentional engagement with Muhammad Ali’s family

As the Center closes in on the end of its strategic plan, these results will be updated.

Together, the Muhammad Ali Center, its stakeholders and Prosper Strategies built a strategic roadmap that not only protects a powerful legacy, but empowers the organization to advance justice, inspire future generations, and thrive for years to come.