Finding Focus to Fuel What’s Next: Puppet Showplace Theater Case Study

CCT Client Case Study

Organization: Puppet Showplace Theater

Location: Brookline, Massachusetts

What they do: Champions the art of puppetry and its power to connect audiences and artists

Type of CCT engagement: Signature consulting engagement: six months of pro bono support

About Puppet Showplace Theater

Puppet Showplace Theater is New England's center for puppetry arts, dedicated to bringing outstanding professional puppetry to diverse audiences while supporting the artists who keep the art form thriving. Through hundreds of performances each year, along with education, artist development, and community programming, Puppet Showplace creates opportunities for audiences to experience puppetry and for professional puppeteers to develop and share their work.

With an ambitious mission, a wide range of programs, and a small team, Puppet Showplace faced an increasingly important question: where should it focus its limited resources to create the greatest impact?

Puppet Showplace worked with CCT through a signature consulting engagement, receiving six months of pro bono strategic support from a team of experienced professionals to help answer that question.

The Challenge

Puppet Showplace came to CCT wanting to take a closer look at the earned-revenue side of its work, which accounts for a significant portion of the organization's income.

But the underlying challenge was bigger. The organization had built a wide range of valuable programs, each with its own audiences, supporters, and potential. Its small team was working across all of them—and increasingly feeling the strain.

“We found that we were stretched too thin among our many worthy programs.”— Veronica Barron, Executive Artistic Director, Puppet Showplace Theater

Puppet Showplace needed a way to look across those opportunities and make thoughtful choices about where to put its energy, what to grow, and what might need to wait.

It was a challenge familiar to many nonprofits: when everything feels important, how do you decide what matters most?

Working Together

Over six months, CCT's team of experienced professionals worked alongside Puppet Showplace's leadership and staff, bringing outside perspective, analytical rigor, and expertise to questions the organization's small team rarely had the bandwidth to step back and explore.

Together, they examined Puppet Showplace's programs, financial performance, opportunities, and organizational capacity. The goal wasn't simply to determine which programs generated the most revenue. It was to understand where greater focus could create the strongest foundation for Puppet Showplace's mission and future.

That partnership was important to Barron. She described CCT's approach not as top-down consulting, but as a process of listening to the organization's own experts and drawing out knowledge that was already there but difficult to tap amid the demands of day-to-day work.

Throughout the engagement, CCT worked closely with Puppet Showplace to ensure its recommendations reflected the organization's realities and could be put into practice. In fact, Puppet Showplace began acting on the team's insights before the engagement was even complete, incorporating them directly into its planning and budgeting process.

As the picture became clearer, so did the choices. The organization identified an area with strong potential for expansion and began aligning resources and measures of success around it. At the same time, leadership recognized that other valuable programs would require different funding strategies before they could command the same level of staff attention.

The question had shifted from “What can we do?” to “Where can we make the greatest progress with the capacity we have?”

More Than a Roadmap

The impact went beyond decisions about programs.

During the engagement, Puppet Showplace experienced a significant staff transition. But the strategic work had helped the remaining team develop a clearer understanding of what the organization needed next.

Rather than waiting for leadership to determine the answer, staff came forward with their own recommendations for how to structure the team moving forward.

For Barron, it was evidence of something larger the CCT engagement had helped create: not simply a roadmap, but greater confidence and shared ownership within the organization.

“That came from working in partnership, not with, like, a top-down approach…”

That confidence extended to the board. After a period of change and uncertainty, the CCT process helped create greater clarity around Puppet Showplace's priorities and what would be required to move them forward. Barron saw both current and prospective board members engaging with renewed energy and a stronger understanding of where the organization was headed.

Outcomes and What's Next

Puppet Showplace entered its next chapter with something that had been difficult to achieve before: focus.

The organization had identified a strategic priority, begun aligning resources behind it, developed clearer measures of success, and made deliberate choices about where not to invest limited capacity for now.

Just as important, staff and board members had a stronger shared understanding of where the organization was going—and greater confidence in their own ability to make the decisions that would get it there.

For an organization accustomed to accomplishing an extraordinary amount with a small team, CCT didn't simply provide more things to do. The work helped Puppet Showplace decide what mattered most and created the clarity and confidence to act on it.

Barron captured that change through an experience close to Puppet Showplace's mission. At a puppet-making session, she watched people take the same basic materials and confidently turn them into entirely different creations, each guided by a clear vision.

She now sees that same confidence in her organization:

“I have a vision for what this could be, and I'm going to jump in and make it happen.”

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