For directors in their first year
MaP Baseline
A director-led assessment that turns your first-year listening into evidence your board will act on — grounded in how your own staff perceive the value the institution creates.
Schedule a CallThe new director’s challenge
Step into an established institution and you inherit the same things every director does: programs with constituencies, relationships built over years, and resource patterns set before you arrived. The board expects decisive action early. The listening tour surfaces what people care about — and turning that into a defensible read of what’s actually working takes evidence a first-year director rarely has time to generate.
MaP Baseline gives you that evidence. We assess your institution across the four dimensions our outcomes model measures — drawn from how your staff perceive the value the institution creates — and benchmark the patterns against comparable museums. You arrive at your board conversations with shared data behind your priorities rather than early impressions.
What makes it a director’s assessment
MaP Baseline is our Outcomes Assessment, run for someone stepping into an institution they’re still getting to know. The instrument is the same. Two things we do differently:
We start with your read
Before your staff take the assessment, we capture your own first impressions of the institution — what you think is working, where you suspect the friction is. When the staff-perception data comes back, you see it against that incoming read: where your instincts are confirmed, and where they would have led you wrong. The standard assessment surveys staff only; for a new director, the contrast is where the value is.
We treat it as your baseline, and point it at your board
We date the assessment as your start-of-tenure snapshot, so you can re-run it down the line and see what has shifted since you arrived. And the insights session is scoped to your first board conversation — turning the data into the evidence-based priorities you will actually present — rather than an internal alignment readout.
What the assessment reveals
Strategic Alignment
What you’ll understandWhere your staff’s read of the institution’s strategic priorities converges, and where it quietly diverges.
The decision it informsSee which initiatives carry shared internal conviction and which rest on a few people — so you know where alignment is real before you build on it.
Outcomes Articulation
What you’ll understandHow confidently your team can articulate the outcomes the institution creates, and where that confidence thins out by audience.
The decision it informsFind where shared language is missing, so staff can make the case to funders and boards with the same footing you do.
Learning Integration
What you’ll understandHow insights from community interaction travel into programs and decisions — and where they stall on the way.
The decision it informsStrengthen the path from what staff learn to what the institution actually does with it.
Financial Performance
What you’ll understandHow your staff read the institution’s financial position and its relationship to mission.
The decision it informsSee where financial clarity and mission reinforce each other, and where staff experience them as in tension.
Ulrich Museum of Art
Participating in the MaP Baseline Assessment has been a transformative experience for the Ulrich Museum of Art. It has been invaluable for us to have our museum staff participate in this assessment. Through this research-driven process and the supportive community of peer museums, we’ve gained insights into aligning our exhibitions and programming with the goals that matter most to our community as our focus. Our participation in the program deepened our understanding of visitor engagement, critical challenges unique to our museum, and how to genuinely interact with the communities we serve. This process has empowered us to become a more dynamic and responsive institution. We highly recommend this assessment to any cultural organization seeking to enhance its impact and foster meaningful connections with its audience.
Vivian ZavataroExecutive and Creative Director, The Ulrich Museum of Art
Most new directors face a hard choice between moving slowly — months of learning while the board waits — and moving fast on instinct. Baseline offers a third path: systematic evidence early enough to inform your first real decisions, grounded in your team’s own read of the institution.
How it works
Team input
Your staff complete a short questionnaire about organizational performance and community impact — a few minutes each. Every voice on the team contributes to the picture.
Pattern analysis
Over three to six weeks, we combine the four dimensions and benchmark them against comparable institutions, surfacing alignment and capability patterns that are hard to see from inside.
Insights session
We facilitate a working discussion of what the data means for your priorities. You leave with a short list of where to focus first — and evidence behind it.
The engagement scales to your institution’s size and budget — we work that out together in the first conversation.
Who does the work
Kyle Bowen
Founder, Museums as Progress
Kelly Cannon
Community Research Partner
Dr. John Falk
Value Realization Partner
Start with a conversation
The first step is a short conversation about your transition and where institutional evidence would help most.
Schedule a CallOther questions? Email [email protected].