As we continue our exploration of the challenges facing museums today, I’m struck by the thoughtful questions we’ve received from museum professionals eager to better understand and measure their institutions’ impact. These questions reflect a growing awareness in our field that traditional metrics often fall short in capturing the true value museums provide to their communities.
In this second installment of our series, I’ll address some of these questions, offering insights based on my decades of research into museum value and impact. This series aims to provide a glimpse into the transformative approach we’ll be exploring in my 2025 collaboration with Museums as Progress (MaP), which combines MaP’s Progress-Space Research methodology with my Value Realization Process.
Let’s begin with a fundamental question that lies at the heart of our work:
How do we quantify value?
This deceptively simple query encapsulates a challenge that has long plagued our field. For too long, museums have relied on easily countable metrics like visitor numbers or ticket sales to demonstrate their worth. While these figures have their place, they fail to capture the profound and often lasting impact museum experiences can have on individuals and communities.
My research over the past several years, involving tens of thousands of museum users across eight countries, has revealed that museums generate an extraordinary amount of value for their current users. Virtually everyone who visits a museum leaves with measurably enhanced personal, intellectual, social, and physical well-being; value that typically lasts for days, weeks, or even months.
In our 2025 pilot program, we’ll guide participants through a process of identifying, measuring, and articulating this multi-faceted value. This involves developing tools to assess how well the museum is supporting the mental models of its users. Participants will produce an opportunity map that helps render qualitative data in terms that can satisfy those with an appetite for numbers (e.g., funders).
Another participant posed a more specific question about impact measurement:
How can we best investigate the impact our Science Center is having on more diverse audiences?
This question touches on a critical issue for contemporary museums: how to ensure we’re serving and positively impacting all segments of our communities. The approach we’ll be exploring in our collaboration with MaP offers a powerful solution to this challenge.
By focusing on goals rather than demographics, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of how different groups perceive and value our institutions. Through deep listening sessions and the creation of opportunity maps, we can visualize how a Science Center (or any museum) can support various community goals, thereby measuring impact in ways that are meaningful to diverse audience segments.
A common concern, particularly among smaller institutions, is reflected in this question:
How can smaller museums gather data and analyze data with a small staff?
I understand that resource constraints can make comprehensive data collection seem daunting. However, it’s crucial to remember that valuable insights can be gleaned even with limited resources. Participating museums will explore scalable approaches to data collection and analysis, including:
Prioritizing key metrics that align with your institution’s specific goals and community needs
Leveraging cost-effective tools and technologies for data gathering and analysis
Engaging volunteers and community members in the data collection process
Fostering collaborative learning and resource sharing among program participants
Finally, one forward-thinking participant asked:
What are the things that we can be doing to start tracking and measuring well-being in our institution? I’m interested in tracking both individual well-being and community well-being.
This question aligns nicely with the core principles of the Value Realization Process, and while I’ve written extensively on well-being and museums, my collaboration with MaP is not focused exclusively on well-being. (If well-being is a priority, you might want to refer to my last book The Value of Museums.) For this effort, though, we’ll invite program participants to engage in a process to identify a specific community goal that is of strategic value to their institution. Well-being, which can be personal, intellectual, social, or physical, typically does overlap and intersect with people’s goals. However, our approach in 2025 will be to frame our efforts in terms of goals first and foremost.
As we move forward in this series, we’ll continue to explore how museums can become truly community-centered institutions, creating and measuring value in ways that support long-term sustainability and community impact. I invite you to join us in this exciting initiative. Together, we can rethink how museums create, measure, and articulate their value in the 21st century.