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Preservation spread
Saving Knight Foundry will
depend in great part on benefiting from the
experience of the past effort. The successes will be easy
to build on; an
exemplary interpretive program was put in place by Friends.
The lessons
from the failures are more difficult to sort out, but
essential to understand,
especially if we are to persuade potential funders to
support the re-start
effort. (I hope no one feels bruised by this critique; it
is based on my own
no doubt limited observations. The past effort was
dedicated, unstinting of
energy and displayed flashes of brilliance, and hind-sight
is always 20-20.)
Some of the organizational problems were those all too
common to
volunteer groups and under-capitalized start-ups:
* Failure to
share leadership responsibilities with the pool of talent
available,
resulting in the burnout of 'heroic leaders' isolated at the top.
* Failure to
effectively communicate with the broad base of supporters
and to
adequately acknowledge the contributions of donors.
* Crisis
management - that is, being managed bythe ongoing crisis of day
to day
survival, rather than working from a strategic plan.
* Inexpert
opinion was allowed to have precedence over qualified
expertise, a
perennial failure of committee process, here with fatal
consequences
for the fund raising effort.
Other problems were unique to this particular situation:
* The group was
bifurcated into a non-profit Friends of Knight Foundry
and for-profit
Historic Knight Foundry, Inc., with consequent dividing of
energy and
working at cross purposes. The need of the foundry to
generate sales
income does not dictate such a structure.
*A premature drive to acquire the
Foundry from the owner became a
growing
obsession which drained energy and stores of good will from
other pressing
priorities.
* The most
serious strategic weakness, caused by the absence of
appropriate
expertise, was the nearly total failure to market and sell the
products and
services of the foundry to new customers.
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