How to brief a cultural strategist (before you even have a brief)

People often delay reaching out because they think they need a proper brief first: objectives, budget, timeline, appendices. Honestly — you don’t. Some of the best projects I have worked on started with a rough idea, a problem that needed solving, or a sense that something wasn’t quite working yet.

Here is all a useful first message needs.

Three lines is enough

1. What you are working on. A museum, a programme, a collection, a market entry, a district, a brand moving into culture — in your own words, at whatever stage it is truly at.
2. Where the project is based. Geography changes everything: the audiences, the institutional landscape, the partners, the pace.
3. What you need help figuring out. Not what you need delivered — what is unclear. “We do not know who this is for”, “we are not sure the gap is real”, “the story is not landing” are all excellent briefs.

What you can skip

Budget precision, final timelines, internal politics, and any pressure to sound further along than you are. Ambiguity is normal at this stage; pretending otherwise just delays the useful conversation. If the honest status is “big ambition, unclear path”, say exactly that — that is where this kind of work starts.

What the first conversation looks like

Mostly questions. What exists already, who it is for, what has been tried, what success would look like in five years, what is fixed and what is open. By the end there is usually a shared sense of whether this needs research, strategy, narrative, sourcing — or a smaller first step. Scope comes after understanding, not before.

Then it is simple

Send an email with those few lines. It does not need to be fully formed — that is rather the point. And if you want a sense of how the work unfolds from there, start with what a cultural strategist actually does.