Before we started using participant outcomes as a prioritization device, our process for helping museums identify valuable user goals took longer. It was a repeatable process, but it was one built on the assumption that we needed to develop a shared vocabulary within the institutions or department from scratch.
We’d start with a very open process, inviting staff to identify distinguishing behaviors among visitors, members, donors, etc. It was a good exercise because it got teams thinking in atomic, bottom-up terms. (A distinguishing behavior is just what it sounds like: Anything that one person does at your institution that others don’t. Some people have a picnic when they visit? That’s a distinguishing behavior. Will some people only renew their membership in person? Another distinguishing behavior. And so on.) Once we were operating in this essential-behaviors mode, we could start thinking about how behaviors relate to goals (user outcomes) and begin prioritizing which goals aligned with the institution’s critical challenges. The point of the process was to identify where to direct our efforts. The most valuable research we can do lives at that intersection of high value to the user and high value to the organization.
So, participant outcomes are something of a cheat code for us. They help us get to that bottom-up thinking faster. We can skip some of the distinguishing behaviors naming and jump straight to a shared language for what stakeholders are actually getting out of their participation — a set of 24 outcomes grounded in decades of research on museum visitor well-being.
It also lets us bring more staff into the discussion. Where before we might have five or ten people moving through a prioritization process (the limits of synchronous workshopping), we can now seed outcomes thinking throughout the organization.
But now there’s a new hurdle. Sometimes people are hesitant about collecting data from everyone. Should we really invite security guards to take this? Our weekend volunteers?
Often this comes from a place of genuine concern — folks want the results to be informative, not noise. I appreciate that. But outcomes are everyone’s business. You don’t have to be an expert to reflect on your own observations. A security guard is just as — perhaps better — equipped to notice how often people are making social connections in your space than a curator. You can be an HR professional at a museum and be deeply invested in hiring for user outcomes. And even if a staff member doesn’t know whether a museum’s participants are achieving certain outcomes, there is value in them recognizing that they don’t know, that their colleagues may know, and that the museum is prioritizing user outcomes.
The more fundamental issue, though, is that the instinct to restrict this kind of thinking to select departments is why outcomes-first approaches struggle to take root.
If we treat user goals and outcomes as somehow ‘advanced’, then it will always be experienced as ‘more work’.
If museum studies students don’t encounter this from day one, then it’s more likely to be viewed as optional.
If interns and entry-level employees aren’t exposed to this early on, we’re encouraging a ‘that’s someone else’s job’ mentality.
If membership or visitor experience or development managers are trained in pure tactics — marketing funnels or basic customer service practices — because those are ‘essential’, then what are we saying about user outcomes and community goals? The implicit message is that outcomes are someone else’s concern.
But without user outcomes, what is the point of learning anything new?
What is the purpose of learning or improving without user outcomes? Is it to be a better museum professional? To be a better practitioner of ‘best practices’? To earn more money? Those are all fine, but are those the things that motivate your best people?
Outcomes are why we do what we do. They’re what make us providers with a purpose, not mere experts.
We know that museums can adopt this thinking — embedding it throughout their organizations. Just last week, John Falk shared accounts of several organizations on that path. Those leaders understand that when outcomes prioritization is reserved for leadership, the rest of the organization experiences it as instructions without context — a directive about what's now expected without any change in how people understand their work. The reluctance to include others in this level of decision-making — however well intentioned it may be — has consequences. If we hew to our defaults, we risk creating a caste system within the institution around who gets to think about what the museum is for, and then we wonder why the rest of the staff treat new ideas like homework.
Where does outcomes thinking first appear at your institution? If it exists only in the strategic plan, the board retreat, or the director’s bookshelf — that’s where it stays.
Our outcomes assessment was built for this — to give everyone in your museum, regardless of role, a way into the conversation about what your institution is for. If you want to start that conversation, request the assessment.