Tell me about your strat plan

I get it — strategic planning is hard. Payoff takes months or years. And there are dozens of other tasks demanding your attention right now. But in a tumultuous time, you need a guide. That’s what your strat plan is. Start now if you don’t have one — or it’s woefully out of date.”

Tom Davidson, the Bellisario Professor of the Practice in Media Entrepreneurship at Penn State University

I’ve been beating a drum in this space for the past year: The broadcast and media landscapes have irreversibly changed. Our public media mission is essential — but our audiences are fading away and will not magically return.

We need to adapt or die.

This has led to a question I’ve had from many station leaders, especially in response to this rant a few weeks ago — “Should you fire your CEO?”: OK. So, where do we start? What are we supposed to do?

For me, that answer always starts with a strategic plan.

At high-functioning organizations, it’s the roadmap. It concisely recaps the organization’s current condition, sets a vision for the future — and offers just enough detail to drive near-term actions.

But strategic planning often gets shunted aside for the crisis of the moment (hello, federal funding threats!). Or, worse, it gets treated as this once-a-decade exercise in lofty words utterly disconnected from day-to-day activities.

I get it: Strat planning is time-consuming, and the process is daunting. But done right, it helps your entire team (and even the community) understand where you want to be in a year, five years and a decade.

Hence, this checklist of sorts:

 Does your organization even have a strategic plan? Has it been updated in the past five years?

The broadcast world doesn't look like it did in 2019, with COVID, aging audiences, Spotify and nearly a dozen general-interest video streaming services. An old plan is just as bad as no plan. I could even be persuaded that it’s worse than no plan because an out-of-date plan could lead you down the wrong path.

And plans must reflect your organization and your community. You can’t just copy and paste from another organization you like — no matter how well they’re doing. Yes, you might be able to crib some data about changing media habits, and both NPR and PBS should be able to help you gather and understand that data. However, this is a case where the old public media joke actually applies: If you know one market, congratulations — you know one market.

Set up a team. Scrape together money for an outside consultant if you can. Give that team a mandate to take a dispassionate look at the world as it is (not as you’d like it to be) and assess your organization’s strengths, weaknesses and the opportunities and threats they imply.

Now, assess the media landscape. Is your current plan — and the bulk of your organization’s daily work — still focused on the “Holy Tower and License?”

The fundamental change of the past 15 years is that media scarcity is dead. Our entire model was built on the idea that “God, the laws of physics and the FCC say there are only a handful of broadcasters in this market!” Digital distribution — especially platforms like YouTube, Spotify and TikTok — nuked that scarcity.

Our peers in commercial media know that. It’s why Comcast is ditching its cable networks, and both iHeart and Sirius XM are desperately trying to redefine themselves as on-demand and live event companies. Even my 21-year-old students know that. One student snapped my head around a couple of weeks ago when he said, without prompting, “Barriers to entry are gone.”

But I’ve read far too many public media strat plans that contain phrases like “rebuild our prime-time or drive-time audience” or “return to (pick your comfortable terrestrial format here).”

That sort of thinking didn’t save the Penn Central railroad in 1967 or Knight-Ridder newspapers in 2005. It won’t save your station today.

What role do you play in your community?

Your market has doubtless changed, too: economically, demographically and politically. How much does your organization understand and participate in that change? Put another way: When’s the last time someone from your senior team met an emerging community leader?

That local connection is vital — particularly as digital distribution erodes the value of that national content from PBS, NPR, APT and APM. Audiences can get that stuff anywhere, and a nearly limitless pool of creators can supply similar content.

The only real way to build defensible donor relationships is to deliver unique local value to your communities. That value might be in local content, but it could entail fostering local communities around key issues and topics.

Which community interests have the most gaping unmet needs? Which topics have large numbers of interested people but need better connective tissue? In other words, where can your organization best fulfill its mission?

Those decisions require deep, humble conversations with your communities to determine the answers. And those conversations can't be outsourced to a national content provider.

Finally, once you write or update your plan, does your staff have access to it?

Don’t treat your plan the way the medieval church did the Bible — locked away so that only certain people can read it. Strategic plans exist so your staff can make daily decisions about how they spend their limited time.

A well-communicated plan allows everybody on your team — yes, even the 23-year-old newcomer — to say, “Hey, I should do this because it contributes to our long-term goal of X. And I should stop writing the TPS Report because it’s meaningless.”

One of the best people I ever worked with, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Julie Anderson, used to paper the walls of her division’s floor with bullet-point reminders of her strat plan’s goals. Everybody on her team got a copy of the plan. The goals were routinely measured, and results were discussed at the quarterly all-staff. Those plans belonged to the entire organization (not just the C-suiters), and it shouldn’t surprise you that those teams generated outsized results year after year.

Can you say the same about your team?      

I get it — strategic planning is hard. Payoff takes months or years. And there are dozens of other tasks demanding your attention right now. But in a tumultuous time, you need a guide. That’s what your strat plan is. Start now if you don’t have one — or it’s woefully out of date.

Tom Davidson is a professor of practice in media entrepreneurship at the Bellisario School of Communications, Penn State University. He was previously a reporter, content leader, general manager and product builder at Tribune, PBS, UNC-TV and Gannett. He can be contacted at tgd@tgdavidson.com.