The Value Realization Collaborative
Museums as Progress (MaP) and Dr. John Falk are addressing a key challenge in the museum sector: audience engagement and diversification. This year-long program combines MaP's Progress-Space Research methodology with Dr. Falk's Value Realization Process to help museums develop goal-oriented strategies for community understanding and engagement.
Program Overview
This collaboration helps museums:
Shift from demographic-based to goal-oriented audience understanding
Develop strategies that resonate with diverse community needs
Implement practical, measurable changes in programming and operations
Structure
Year 1 (2025)
Phase 1: Calibration and Articulation (Winter-Spring 2025)
We’ll begin by reading John Falk's book Leaning into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum. Institutions will be invited to choose a community goal to prioritize and support. Your staff will learn data collection techniques to understand community goals.
Phase 2: Learning, Listening, and Sense-Making (Spring-Summer 2025)
Your team gets hands-on practice listening to community members and synthesizing qualitative data. This is foundational for your museum’s ability to validate its impact.
Phase 3: Creation and Validation (Summer-Fall 2025)
Participants create opportunity maps — a visual assessment tool to evaluate how your institution can better support the diverse ways people approach their goals. You’ll use your map in funding appeals and stakeholder communications.
Year 2 and Beyond (2026, Optional)
Seasonal assessments to measure changes in audience engagement
Private sessions to discuss expanding the program to additional community goals
Continued access to Museum Membership benefits
Who Should Participate
This program is for museums that are:
Committed to becoming more user-centered
Willing to challenge traditional approaches to audience engagement
Ready to invest time and resources in long-term transformation
Investment
Program pricing is based on your museum's operating budget. Complete the inquiry form below to receive a quote.
Courses are purchased separately ($297 for each learning leader; Plan for one to three learning leaders, depending on the size of your institution)
Limited Availability
This pilot program is limited to 18 organizations to ensure personalized attention and support. Early registration is encouraged.
Co-Creating the Value Realization Collaborative
Our pilot program is being developed in conversation with museum professionals like you. Visit our interactive canvas in Miro to dive deeper into the program and share how this program relates to your museum’s efforts to support its communities better.
Key Dates
Friday, November 22, 2024
Early Bird Deadline
Friday, January 10, 2025
Last Day to Register
This program will require the completion of coursework from your institution’s learning leader(s). We recommend they begin course #1 (Listening Deeply in Museums) in 2024. An early start will help them complete the work more leisurely.
To encourage early enrollment and participation, organizations that register before November 22 will be given access to course material at no additional cost.
Registration
We offer a sliding scale that’s based on your institution’s annual operating budget.
Does your museum need to get funding approval to participate?
We’ve created a template you can download, edit, and share with your colleagues and stakeholders to make the case for your museum’s participation.
Q&A
The time commitment will vary depending on the staff member's role and the project phase.
Phase 1: Calibration and Articulation (Winter-Spring 2025)
EDs/CEOs will convene weekly to read and discuss Dr. Falk's forthcoming book Leaning Into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum. The group will be hosted as part of MaP's Strategic Museum Exchange Group. Expect weekly, 50-minute meetings over 6 to 8 weeks. Each participant in the reading group will be provided with a copy of the book.
Each organization should identify at least one staff member responsible for data collection and synthesis. During this time, your learning leader(s) will complete the necessary coursework so they can collect data for the project. These courses include: Listening Deeply in Museums, Data Synthesis 1, and Data Synthesis 2. We recommend your learning leader(s) begin with course #1, Listening Deeply, as soon as possible. By beginning sooner, they can take their time with the material.
Finally, directors and learning leaders will come together to select a user goal they wish to prioritize. This prioritization process takes several working sessions. Plan to allocate 6–8 hours over one to two weeks.
Phase 2: Learning, Listening, and Sense-Making (Spring-Summer 2025)
Expect 2-3 hours of work per week per learning lead as they continue coursework, conduct listening sessions, and synthesize data from listening sessions.
Phase 3: Creation and Validation (Summer-Fall 2025)
Expect ~2 hours of work per week per learning lead as they develop thinking styles and/or opportunity maps based on the data they’ve collected.
Phase 3 will bring everyone together to identify what will change as a result of what you learn (reviewing opportunity maps and/or thinking styles)
Program participants will have direct access to Dr. John Falk through regular strategy sessions throughout the year. These sessions will provide opportunities to:
Validate your institution's progress-focused initiatives
Get an expert perspective on your opportunity mapping
Connect your work to broader sector trends
MaP will support your team throughout the process, including during data collection. We do this in several ways:
Courses: Learning leaders will complete three courses on data collection and synthesis, each of which is hosted through our website and can be accessed as needed by your staff when convenient for them.
Co-working sessions: Trained MaP team members will host regular co-working sessions to help participants collect and synthesize data. There will be one to three co-working sessions each week, which your learning leaders can join.
Asynchronous access to experts: Your learning leader(s) will be able to ask questions on specific course lessons which in our LMS and will be able to message our team to get answers and support as needed.
Within the larger cohort (up to 18 organizations), we will have sub-cohorts (3 museums in each group). Each sub-cohort will be working together to collect and synthesize data in relation to a user/community goal.
Each institution will have one to three staff members contributing as learning leaders. (The more staff members, the lighter the workload for each individual.) A sub-cohort will consist of 3 to 9 learning leaders. With the help of course material and the MaP team, these individuals will be responsible for working together to comb through the transcripts from the listening sessions they’ve conducted and pull out the pieces we’ll use to create an opportunity map (one map for each sub-cohort).
While MaP will not be completing this work for institutions, we expect participants to need continual support, which we will provide throughout the community of practice through regular co-working sessions and asynchronous communication.
If you have evaluators at your organization, this work will be well-suited to their work. However, we know that many museums do not have researchers on staff, and this work (listening and making sense of how your institution can support community goals) does not need to be done by an evaluator.
In fact, if you do have one or more researchers at your institution, we encourage you to bring at least one other staff member into your working group to work alongside your evaluator(s). A cross-functional team is ideal. You may invite people who work in any of the following departments:
Education
Curation
Exhibits
Visitor Experience
Community Outreach
Membership
Marketing
Each of these departments plays an important role in defining value for your users and community members. Listening and understanding user needs is relevant to each and every staff member whose job includes creating or communicating value for your audience. For this program, the individual’s curiosity and their interest in playing a leading role in this effort to develop a more user-centered institution will be more important than their title.
The primary output is an opportunity map. An opportunity map describes how people approach a goal. It is also a tool that assesses an organization’s stregths and weaknesses in supporting the goal in question.
Here is an example (click to expand):
In the example above, the organization has chosen the goal Cultivate child’s interest in living things/nature. Your institution’s goal will be different — Every map is unique and is based on the organization’s strategic priorities and what’s relevant to their specific, local communities.
The light blue columns describe the different “towers” of mental attention — These are created based on listening sessions with community members.
The darker grey columns below describe ways that the institution is trying to support the various approaches to the goal. In some columns we see more instances, which may suggest stronger support. In others there are few or even no instances of the organization supporting the tower of mental attention. These represent areas where the organizaiton may wish to invest resources (e.g., improved communications, changes to programs, new programs, etc.)