Four factors for prioritizing outcomes

How does an institution decide on an experiential posture?¹

This question came up this week with two museums we’re working with. Identity questions are the hardest to answer. They always feel premature (“We just need more data!”) and high-stakes, so even the smartest teams can and do stall on them. I’ll write down how I think about it here, in the hope that it’s helpful to some of you who are navigating the “who are we for” discussion at your institution.

The decision gets easier once you notice you’ve already made it. The choice you made has just been buried in disconnected goals — a wishlist the sector blesses as a ‘strategic plan’. Look carefully, and you’ll see the claims baked into your current plan.

If, for example, everyone in your museum knows that staff are seriously burnt out, and your strategic plan says that you’re going to become a ‘third place’ for people downtown, then you’ll feel weird claiming that becoming that ‘third place’ will somehow alleviate your critical challenge (staff burnout and the consequences of it). If we assume that being a ‘third place’ for a community is really about providing social well-being (e.g., connecting others who wouldn’t otherwise build social bonds), then you can simply stitch together what’s been implied: Your strategy says, “By being the place that provides a sense of connection and belonging among disparate groups for our communities, we think we’ll be able to address staff burnout, and we’ll know it’s working when we see fewer staff quitting, more people showing up to work, etc.”

You might read that and think, “That’s ridiculous. How can focusing on that outcome address something like staff burnout?” But that’s the point. If a strategic plan is only useful to the degree that it addresses the institution’s well-being, then choosing an outcome that has no logical connection to your critical challenge is nonsensical. Take comfort in knowing that almost every museum does this wishlisting and slaps ‘strategic’ on it. When practically everyone is making the same mistake, things can only get better from here.

Ultimately, the goal is to produce a theory of advantage that says, “By being the place that provides [outcome] for our communities, we think we’ll be able to address [our critical challenge], and we’ll know it’s working when we see [observable, pre-defined results].”

You will likely feel uncomfortable making a claim like that. It doesn’t naturally come for most museums (or humans in any organization) because the claim will almost always rest on tenuous causal logic.

Try another one: “By being the place that people can come to feel free from work and routine, we think we’ll be able to address our financial challenges, and we’ll know it’s working when we see admission and membership revenue increase.”

If that seems implausible to you, then you should try on other outcomes, not abandon the premise. To do otherwise is to just continue on with the status quo (i.e., doing museum-shaped things and hoping for the best). Remember that these outcomes are supported by all kinds of organizations. Netflix helps people feel relaxed and calm. A membership to a local golf club helps verbally challenged men who otherwise don’t know how to connect with others spend quality time with others. The local historical society’s events celebrating America’s 250th anniversary help some people feel connected to something bigger than themselves. Netflix makes a lot of money helping people chill out. No one at Netflix says, “Why are we even talking about helping our users chill out? We’re a streaming company. Our job is to stream stuff!”

To decide which outcomes to prioritize, it helps to think about four things.

Strengths, Desire, Ecosystem, and Challenge

This approach assumes you’ve already done some degree of scoping. The museums we work with have completed our Outcomes Assessment, so teams are already thinking in terms of value to the user. The outcomes are well-studied — John Falk has spent years documenting what people actually carry away from a museum visit — so you’re not starting from zero or debating with one another over a blank whiteboard. The assessment provides an aggregate view of your staff’s confidence around what participants (i.e., members, visitors) gain from engaging with your museum. When the results show that staff are more confident that existing users feel a sense of joy when visiting the museum, for example, we take that as a sign of an inherent advantage or strengths (factor 1)². The wisdom of the crowd provides a clue as to where you have a foothold in supporting individuals’ well-being. Depending on the scope of what you decide to do next, this will need to be validated with visitor research. If, for example, you’re making a high-stakes decision, like actually naming a definitive posture for the entire museum for an extended period (strategic plan), then you’ll want to invest in more research. If you just want to try this out for a single touchpoint — an experiment — then the risk is low. The decision and the experiment are practically the same thing. At that scale, you’re prototyping a posture. Run it on one touchpoint, watch what it tells you, and let that inform the bigger call.

We also want to consider what outcomes staff enjoy supporting (factor 2). My tendency (correct, IMO) is to calibrate guidance in this area a bit — it’s very easy for the museum to default to doing what they want to do, what they’re good at, or what’s familiar. Museums are filled with experts; experts will find doing expert-shaped things rewarding, and those things may not be inherently valuable to users. Still, we shouldn’t entirely discount what staff want to support. Users benefit when staff arrive at work looking forward to applying their expertise to outcomes they want to support. If most of your team is utterly uninspired by the prospect of creating experiences or communications that help people feel relaxed or calm (physical) or connect with others in their group (social), then it’s probably unwise to force that on them.

We also want to consider the ecosystem of support (factor 3) for the user — a fancy way of asking: What alternatives are available to people who use our museum? The most literal interpretation of this is to compare apples to apples. If you’re an art museum in a city with one or two other art museums, you might consider what outcomes they’re emphasizing with their programming, exhibits, etc. Are they leaning into intellectual outcomes? Should your efforts provide an alternative — perhaps you’re the art museum that leans hardest into social outcomes.³ A more ambitious interpretation is a fruit-wide search: What are the many ways that people in our area can feel more relaxed and calm or build a sense of belonging with others with whom they might not otherwise normally connect? This approach sets aside apples-to-apples comparisons and adopts a more user-centric view. After all, while it’s true some people do sometimes wake up wondering which museum they might want to go to, it’s more often the case that they are deciding what they can do to chill out after a stressful week or meet new people after being cooped up working from home all week.

Then, there’s what’s most relevant to your institution. What is the critical challenge (factor 4) that our organization faces today, and which of these user outcomes is most likely to have a positive impact on that challenge? This is another dimension we measure in our Outcomes Assessment by asking staff what they perceive to be more or less challenging for the institution across several dimensions. If, for example, staff burnout is a major challenge, we might argue that staff desire (factor 2) is more important, because prioritizing value that staff are disinterested in won’t do much to help them feel invigorated in their work. If, on the other hand, financial sustainability is the challenge you need to prioritize over all else, you can ask whether it’s sensible to believe that the museum can increase earned revenue or giving by leading with social outcomes, for example. “We’re a community hub” can and does produce different financial results than “We’re a place to recharge in peace and quiet”.⁴

These are the four factors I’d encourage you to consider as you wade through the process of prioritizing outcomes at your museum. Is there another dimension you see that I haven’t named? How are you navigating these discussions at your museum? Let me know in a reply to today’s email. I like hearing from you.

— Kyle