Small Wins. Big Lessons - They Tried Something Small. It Worked.
"Marketing Moments" concluded “The Things We’re Not Saying” series last week. It called out some of the tensions we tend to talk around in the arts. Capacity and money, for example.
I’m not done with those conversations, but this week we’re starting a new series: “Small Wins, Big Lessons”.
I want to look at what arts organizations are actually trying. Not only the splashy success stories with big budgets and polished case studies, but the choices organizations make when they have a problem to solve, an idea worth testing, and limited resources to work with.
We’ll use real cases and success stories as evidence, then ask the question that matters for the rest of us: What can we learn from the choice they made?
Because the goal isn’t to hand you someone else’s playbook and tell you to replicate it. Your organization, audience, community, and capacity are different. What is transferable is the thinking underneath the decision. What did they notice? What assumption did they question? What did they try? And so on. In other words: organizations like yours are finding ways forward. Their choices can teach the rest of us something.
And for our first installment, I want to start small.
Literally.
There was something deeply satisfying about MythBusters.
Someone would walk in with a thing everybody “knew.” A car will explode if you shoot the gas tank, or you can escape from Alcatraz on a homemade raft.
Then - they would build something, break something, and, my favorite, occasionally blow something up to find out whether what everybody knew was actually true.
I think nonprofit arts organizations could use a little more of that energy.
We carry around a remarkable number of assumptions about our audiences, our programs, and our marketing, like younger audiences won’t buy subscriptions or people won’t come on weeknights. How often have you heard, “Nobody reads email anymore”?
Some of those things may be true. But have we tested them?
A small experiment can produce a large piece of information.
The Myth Is Plausible. Proceed With Caution.
I understand why experimentation can feel uncomfortable when resources are already tight. When you only have so much money, staff time, and emotional bandwidth, spending any of it on something that might fail feels irresponsible.
The current financial environment doesn't exactly encourage nonprofit arts leaders to feel adventurous.
SMU DataArts' National Trends 2025 found that average revenue among nonprofit arts and cultural organizations fell 25 percent from 2023 to 2024, while average expenses declined 23 percent. 44 percent of organizations operated at a deficit in 2024, and staff counts reached their lowest level in six years.
When those are the conditions you're working under, I understand the instinct to make every dollar prove itself before you've even spent it.
Except certainty is expensive too.
A large initiative built on an untested assumption can consume far more money, staff time, and goodwill than a small experiment that tells you, early, that your assumption was wrong.
That is why I think we need to get more comfortable with the pilot.
Build the Small Version
One example that comes to mind is from Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit.
During a period of enormous disruption, Mosaic began approaching organizational change through what EmcArts called “Small Experiments with Radical Intent.” Rather than attempting to predict exactly what its future operating model should look like, the organization tested changes, watched what happened, and adjusted.
One early assumption was that reducing staff would help lower costs. Their experience with online programming taught them something different: keeping young people engaged actually required a higher ratio of adult artists to participants. Mosaic changed course and increased its teaching staff.
Other small experiments eventually contributed to larger changes in how its programming operated. A pilot isn't simply a miniature version of the permanent program you're already determined to create. It is a learning mechanism.
You are trying something because you have a question.
"Will people respond differently if we change this?" or perhaps, "Will this audience come if we remove that barrier?"
Now you have something you can actually investigate.
Decide What Would Count as Evidence
Here's where I think we sometimes get into trouble.
We try something new. Great!
Six people come. Not so great?
Somebody on staff says six is disappointing. Somebody else says six is wonderful because three had never attended before. The executive director says the event cost too much. The program person says everyone stayed afterward talking for 45 minutes.
Everybody may be right.
The problem is that nobody agreed beforehand what the experiment was designed to tell us.
Before launching a pilot, decide what you're trying to learn and what evidence would help you answer the question.
Maybe success means attracting 25 first-time attendees or getting 15 percent of participants to return or even testing whether changing the day of the week increases registration.
You can still discover things you weren't looking for. In fact, PLEASE do. But defining success beforehand prevents us from moving the goalposts afterward to protect an idea we already love.
An Experiment That Fails Can Still Work
I'm going to say this loud for the folks in the back.
An unsuccessful test and a useless test are two different things.
Calgary Arts Development actually created a "Small Experiments Grant Program" around this idea. Its grants supported “low-risk, high-learning experiments” built around a clearly identified problem, a hypothesis, and a method for gathering information.
I love the phrase high-learning because it changes the question.
Instead of asking only, “Did it work?” we can ask, “What do we know now that we didn't know before?”
A small experiment can produce a large piece of information.
And information gives you choices.
Here's Where We Blow Up the Cement Truck
There is a reason this matters beyond experimentation.
According to the State of Change Management in the Nonprofit Sector, smaller nonprofits often have an advantage when adapting to change because decisions happen closer to the work, communication is more direct, and feedback loops can be faster. Organizations with 6 to 20 staff frequently use flexible, home-grown approaches developed through trial and learning rather than formal change-management systems.
Don't be shy. Who else does this sound familiar to?
Small arts organizations spend a lot of time looking at larger institutions and seeing everything they don't have.
Their staff.
Their budgets.
Their technology.
Their consultants.
Their reach.
But experimentation is one place where being smaller can actually give you an advantage.
You may be able to try something on Thursday, talk about it Friday, and change it by next Thursday.
That's powerful.
The mistake would be trying to imitate a larger organization's finished solution rather than adopting the curiosity that helped somebody discover a solution in the first place.
Because the transferable lesson from Mosaic isn't “do what Mosaic did.”
The lesson is: test the assumption.
Myth: Busted?
The arts sector is operating with fewer comfortable margins than many of us would like.
That makes experimentation more important, not less. We don't have unlimited resources to keep doing things because we've always done them. We also don't have unlimited resources to launch expensive new strategies based primarily on instinct.
What we can do is get curious.
Choose something small enough that getting it wrong won't hurt you.
Decide what you want to learn.
Determine what evidence would change your mind.
Run the test.
Look at what happened.
Then decide what deserves to become bigger.
So before your organization turns the next good idea into a strategy, budget line, annual program, or six-month committee discussion, I want you to sit with one question:
What is one assumption your organization could test before turning it into a full strategy?
Sometimes the most useful thing you can discover is that the myth was busted.
And sometimes you discover you've been sitting on something much bigger than you thought.
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