At Creative Plus Business our planning team occupy a rare and special space of being both practicing creative practitioners and qualified business professionals.
We understand the unique issues faced by creative and cultural organisations, particularly at a time of decreased funding opportunities, cost of living pressures, and ever-changing audience trends. Our team bring empathy, specialist knowledge and a comprehensive approach to the planning process, with the sole aim of helping your organisation achieve its goals.
We offer a range of planning services, from facilitating your plan day to writing to finished strategic or business plan. Our planning services can help you:
- develop a strategy for income diversification.
- create a business plan to assist with your next funding application.
- restructure your organisation or team for improved efficiency, clarity or growth.
- review and provide recommendations on your current or future creative program.
- craft a practical marketing plan for your organisation, project or program.
- set a broad strategy to guide your organisation through its next phase.
Not sure what planning service you need? Get in touch with our Head of Strategy, KB Heylen.
Our Strategy & Planning Services
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Document & Program Review
Stakeholder Engagement
Charettes & Intensives
Business & Strategic Plans
Marketing Plans & Audience Engagement
Bespoke Packages
In-Person Facilitation
As creatives and business people, we speak the language of your funding bodies or decision makers but know how to keep things engaging. Whether we’re working with a room full of creatives, a team of arts workers, or a meeting of executives, we bring a bit of fun and irreverence to our in-person planning, while keeping our eye on achieving your desired outcome.
PLAN DAY
We will facilitate a full or half day of strategic brainstorming around ideas, strategies and directions for your creative business or arts organisation. This is an ideal option for individuals or groups who are seeking an intensive planning session to help create a business or strategic plan, marketing strategy, or a creative map for a long-term project – the goal is up to you. For our Service NSW Business Connect clients we can facilitate a half-day plan session at no cost to you.
CHARRETTES
This intensive and formulaic approach to problem solving and design thinking is the ideal methodology for engaging with a wide range of stakeholders who need to be part of the planning process. We have worked extensively with government, commercial and not-for-profit groups to help them use this fast and inclusive framework to work through challenges and reach a shared vision for an idea, plan, strategy or project in as little time as possible.
Stakeholder Engagement
All of our planning work starts with listening. Whether that’s interviewing your key team members, surveying employees or clients, or holding feedback workshops with your communities, we take stakeholder engagement seriously. This is often the first step in a larger strategic planning process, and we can incorporate your stakeholder feedback into the plan in a range of ways, from including quotes and statistics, to crafting recommendations, to building entire plans around stakeholder needs
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
Our team interviews the people you know are key to your plan, whether inside or outside your organisation. This can help set the agenda for a plan day, help identify concerns and opportunities, and ensure your key people know they are genuinely involved and heard in what can be a scary time of change.
STAKEHOLDER SURVEYS
Ideal for when you need feedback from large groups, such as employees, clients or community members. We can design, collect and analyse survey data to ensure the work you’re doing meets your stakeholders needs.
FEEDBACK WORKSHOPS
Our team can lead groups through draft plans or concepts to gather their input and ideas and help identify any gaps. This is a great method for small but strategically important groups of stakeholders whose input and buy-in is vital to the success of the project.
Planning & Review
STRATEGIC PLANS
Our team are strategy specialists, and love helping organisations develop big-picture strategies to guide organisations. We begin our process spending time to understand your desired outcome, before using our creative industries knowledge, a review of your internal documents, the results of any planning day or stakeholder engagement activities, and a suite of analytic tools, to craft an individually tailored plan for your organisation. Whether you need to diversify revenue, restructure the organisation, inspire your team, refresh your vision and mission, or just set your organisation’s overall agenda, we will deliver a comprehensive written plan to help you.
BUSINESS PLANS
Our business plans are practical, goal-focused and action-oriented to help with the day-to-day operations of your organisation. Our business plans can be used to support funding applications or investment pitches and cover the sections of a traditional business plan that are relevant to your needs, including administration and management, structural issues, financial records and budgets, and business development, including basic marketing.
Your final plan will include a detailed action plan to help you achieve your agreed goals.
MARKETING PLANS
You might know your product, but how well do you know your customer? We can help you identify your target audience, marketing channels and messages, and ensure your message is consistent across all channels and is aligned to your brand, strategy, or campaign.
We will then craft a practical, action-based marketing plan, including measurements for success, that you can implement.
DOCUMENT & PROGRAM REVIEW
We can review your existing or planned creative programs or documents. This includes speaking with key stakeholders, auditing all existing materials, benchmarking against others in the sector, and making a comprehensive set of recommendations and an action plan for next steps. This service is ideal for local government and service-based organisations looking to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of programs or gauge stakeholder sentiment about future projects.
Some of our amazing clients include:
