From the “Introduction,” to Measuring Museum Impacts and Performance, 2016

The museum field, still shaking off its legacy of inwardly-focused, autonomous privilege, faces critically important questions: What are museums contributing that is important? How are we solving critical social problems? Why have we not been able to account for the value of our contributions? How do museums break through the obstacles to use carefully selected metrics to convince skeptics and help us increase our value?

Museums need measurements to prove and advocate our value, but more fundamentally, we need the right metrics to drive progress toward our goals so that we can improve the human condition, and conserve the trust and value the public has placed on museums. We need measurements to make museums better.

Museums are vitally diverse. Our field already had many categories – art, nature, military, history, technology, children, zoos, aquaria, historic sites, planetariums, botanic gardens and more – before the explosion of new forms during the museum boom – Experience Music  Project (EMP - Seattle), the Newseum (DC), Tate Modern (London), the District Six Museum (Cape Town), Inhotim (Brumadinho, Brazil), and Science Gallery Dublin are just a few examples of innovations in form that have one foot in museum tradition while another steps in a different direction. We are also diverse in size, from tiny historical sites like the two-room Maritime Museum run by volunteers in Marblehead’s old town hall, to the vast Smithsonian system in the US. We are diverse in business models, with the Getty Museum covered by its substantial endowment, the Minnesota History Center covered primarily by public funds, the Pacific Science Center (Seattle) covered mostly by earned revenues, and the Yale University Art Gallery covered by Yale. We are an inclusive field: We include both the Morgan Library and Museum (NYC) and the NASCAR Hall of Fame (Charlotte); both the Louvre (Paris) and the Lucy Desi Center for Comedy (Jamestown, NY); and both the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the Creation Museum (Petersburg, KY).

In the ‘90s, the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) estimated 17,500 museums in the United States alone. The number of US museums has clearly grown during the museum boom, perhaps to around 22,000 to 25,000 museums, most of them small, some of them very large. Globally, museums continue growing, most dramatically in China and the Middle East.

In the US, however, the boom is over. Who survived? Who may not continue to survive? It is fun to build a museum but challenging to sustain its operation. How many museums can our economic, educational, and cultural ecosystems support? Sustainability will depend on delivering important benefits, measuring impact and performance, and constantly tuning the museum’s mix of community services to respond to changing community needs.

“Heresies or Innovations?” from Chapter 9, Measuring Museum Impact and Performance (2016)

We have known museums need measurements for years. Yet no standardized ways of measuring have emerged. No organizing paradigm. During four decades of museum analysis and strategic planning for over a hundred museums internationally,  I find that three 20th century dogmas guard the gates to the possible answers: the Mission-focused Dogma, the Public Value Dogma, and the Output vs. Outcome Dogma. Fortunately, the dogmas are tired and are no longer really able to explain how today’s most vibrant museums operate and what they contribute. I suggest new approaches. Some may see these as heresies and others, I hope, as innovations.

The Mission-focused Dogma: The assumption that the museum’s mission is the museum’s singular end, with everything else just a means to achieve the museum’s mission. As I developed in “The community service museum: owning up to our multiple missions,” most mid- to large museums accomplish far more than just their mission impact (Jacobsen, 2014); hence, evaluating a museum on just its mission accomplishments short-changes that museum’s full social value. This book pluralizes mission and calls them intentional purposes to avoid the accurate but awkward Mission 1, Mission 2, Mission 3, etc.

The Public Value Dogma: The belief that a museum’s public value is the only value that really counts. Instead, treating public, private and personal values as conceptual equals provides a more complete picture of a museum's external values, and reflects the reality of contemporary museum operating budgets, which contain support, sponsorship and earned revenues. In the US, museums have been losing public funding as a share of their total revenues for decades (Merritt & Katz, August 1, 2009). Because museum costs for operating public buildings and conserving collections cannot get smaller, lost taxpayer revenues have resulted in increases in private and personal revenues. Given this long-term shift away from public funding, museums will need to become more intentional about delivering private and personal benefits, without feeling either guilty or nostalgic for shifting some emphasis away from delivering public impacts.

The Output vs. Outcome Dogma: The belief that a museum’s operating data—its output counts—do not qualify as evidence of outcomes. This denial does not respect the expertise of our community and its audiences and supporters nor does it recognize the competitive marketplace where they make their choices. Parents, teachers, grant officers, volunteers, tourists, donors all have expertise and make conscious choices based on that expertise. In a free-choice, competitive marketplace, their votes of money, time and effort are indicators of value in the eyes of experts. Of course these exchanges may be affected by other factors, and periodically such behavioral indicators need to be tested and perhaps revised or refined: Do teachers return because they trust the museum’s educational impact or because it is easy?

Once on the other side of these three dogmas, we can see museums more clearly, and new evaluation strategies and principles open up.

From Section 40 “Guiding Principles” in The Museum Manager’s Compendium (2017)

Guiding principles play a more foundational role in community service museums than in single-mission museums. Given changing purposes evolving in response to the community, a community museum’s guiding principles may be a better place to anchor the corporate culture, brand identity and public persona, than on the mission and what you want to accomplish this year.

As an example, The U.S. Coast Guard proudly declares that it is a multiple mission organization, but it unifies its diverse team and varied efforts under the guiding principle of Semper Paratus (Always Ready).

From Section 42 “Impact and Performance” and 43 “Impacts and Benefits” from The Museum Manager’s Compendium (2017)

A museum aspires to have impacts on its community, audiences and supporters. The community, audiences and supporters receive benefits from the museum. The benefits can be different from the impact: A family visiting an aquarium receives the benefit of a quality family experience, while the aquarium’s desired impact on the family is to heighten their awareness of conserving biodiversity. Or, the benefits and impacts can be aligned: New parents bring their toddler to a children’s museum to see her develop and learn with new kinds of challenges; the children’s museum’s mission is child development. Studying the alignment between a museum’s benefits and impacts may illuminate potentials and inefficiencies. It is useful to remember the distinction, which hinges on their prepositions: Society, individuals and organizations receive benefits from the museum. The museum has impacts on society, individuals and organizations. Benefits are in the eyes of the receiver; impacts are in the desires of the museum.

Analysis of the database of 1,025 Museum Indicators of Impact and Performance (“MIIP 1.0”) reveals twelve broad areas of external impact and two of internal impact. These categories of potential museum contributions and benefits fall under four impact sectors and include: seven categories of public impacts (broadening participation, preserving heritage, strengthening social capital, enhancing public knowledge, serving education, advancing social change, and communicating public identity and image); two private impacts (contributing to the economy, and delivering corporate community services); three personal impacts (enabling personal growth, offering personal respite, and welcoming personal leisure); and two institutional impacts (helping museum operations, and building museum capital).

Each of these categories can be looked at as the impacts desired by the museums and as the benefits perceived by the museum’s audiences and supporters. Comparing the alignment between these two perspectives may lead to increased efficiency.

From Section 63 “The Museum Theory of Action” from The Museum Manager’s Compendium (2017)

The Museum Theory of Action assumes a museum produces its values through a sequence of steps. In this theory, a museum produces its impacts and benefits through iterations of a sequence of logic model-like steps as described in the following constructed narrative: 1) Museum leadership (and/or other forces), in response to perceived community needs and aspirations, determine the museum’s intentional purposes; 2) Leadership and staff filter the many possibilities for achieving those purposes by the museum’s guiding principles to select the museum’s desired impacts and their target audiences and supporters; 3) staff, with their knowledge of the museum’s resources, produce (e.g., plan, design, test, fabricate/create, market, deliver and operate); 4) the museum’s activities, using a constantly iterative cycle of; 5) evaluation and operating data that feed into; 6) the museum’s key performance indicators that monitor; 7) the impacts and benefits the museum is providing its audiences and funders, which feed back to the beginning as one source of their perceived community needs and aspirations (see Table 63.1).

From Section 70 “The Delta Museum” from The Museum Manager’s Compendium (2017)

Remodeling or building museum galleries can no longer be about first creating great exhibits and then enclosing them with space. The exhibits need to change faster than architecture. If we are to be responsible stewards of our community’s scarce capital dollars, then we should invest our supporter’s funds in flexible learning spaces that host a succession of compelling visitor experiences and powerful learning resources. The Delta Museum is an approach to adding change infrastructure to galleries to facilitate scenario change.