Strategic program definition and goal-setting for a top-tier opera company

A major U.S. opera company needed help bringing definition and external perspectives to its vision for a groundbreaking programming model to help make opera feel more relevant, exciting, and meaningful to its diverse community. The institution’s executive leadership team asked Slover Linett to design and facilitate an internal process for developing a clear, cohesive vision for what this new initiative could look like—and how to measure towards that vision on an ongoing basis.  To do so, we designed a set of internal workshops with staff and board members that fed into a detailed logic model.  The logic model that emerged contained a clear articulation of the specific impacts and outcomes intended for audiences of the program and the broader community at large.  This plan not only helped guide the internal team’s development of future programming (by providing a set of consistent goals and outcomes that all staff could focus on), but it also served as the foundation for a set of metrics to be captured and measured on an ongoing basis (i.e., to help provide insight into whether the institution is achieving what they hope and intend to through this programming model).   As a next-step leading from this logic model, the leadership team asked us to extend our support by leading another internal workshop designed to assess how well-aligned their current programming—as well as in-gestation ideas for future programming—were with the intended goals.