Institutional Value and Accountability
To be successful in the twenty-first century, museums will need to rethink how they define their purpose and measure their success. In order to be perceived as truly fundamental to their communities, museums will need to rewrite their mission and impact statements to more directly align with the identity-related visit motivations of their visitors.
I subscribe to the statement by the late Stephen Weil that, “In everything museums do, they must remember the cornerstone on which the whole enterprise rests: to make a positive difference in the quality of people’s lives.”1 However, achieving this goal requires understanding not just the needs and wants of the public, but how the public can best be served by the resources and capabilities of the museum. The most successful museums are those who have found ways to merge their own interests and capabilities with those of their public and by appreciating that it’s neither about just “giving them what they want” nor about just “giving them what they need.” It’s about understanding how these two ideas can merge into a single, unified action.
Although the criteria for determining success as a cultural institution at the beginning of the Knowledge Age are still evolving, there are a few universals that reflect the increasing value placed on leisure, learning, self-affirmation, and personalization that are hallmarks of this new age. Successful museums maximize the flexibility and ingenuity of their relationships both inside and outside the organization while responding to rapidly shifting economic, social, and political realities. Success is not limited to a single set of outcomes, but requires excellence in basic areas: (1) support of the public good which includes accomplishing one’s cultural/aesthetic mission, but also involves being a good community citizen; (2) organizational investment which includes building and nurturing staff; supporting a climate and culture for creativity, innovation, collaboration, and research and development; and (3) financial stability which includes building organizational value and, when possible, generating annual financial surpluses that can be used to further support institutional learning and hence, the public good.2 The issues of organizational investment and financial stability are beyond the scope of this book, but it is important to note that success cannot be achieved without them.3 Supporting public good, though, can be reinterpreted in light of the ideas presented in this book.
SUPPORT OF THE PUBLIC GOOD
Every museum must be clear about why it exists and whom it is trying to serve. In other words, the museum must specify what specific needs (or wants) it is uniquely positioned to satisfy for each segment of the public it hopes to serve. In particular, the museum should assess what assets both it and the public bring to the table. Considerable debate in the United Kingdom has surrounded the issue of “cultural value.” Cultural value has been characterized as having multiple dimensions; all of which are important components of what I would consider “public good.”4
As highlighted in the opening quotation by Weil, creating public value, or ensuring that the public (or more likely publics) is better off after an institution’s actions than it was before, are the hallmarks of an effective museum in the Knowledge Age. As Weil has also written, the goal of a museum can no longer be about something, whether that is art, history, science or nature; today, a museum must also set as its goal to be for somebody.5 This transition must begin with the organization’s mission and be reflected in all of its activities, including a sincere commitment to assessing the public good actually achieved by the organization. A corollary of this focus on public value is that museums have tried too hard to be all things to all people for too long. One of the important products of a focus on specifying and measuring the goal of public value is that it leads organizations to accept the limitations of their capacity to impact the public and requires that they target specific audiences in order to be strategic and optimize their impact.
Most museums argue that they exist to serve their community, to support civic engagement and build social capital, but many continue to focus on fairly traditional and self-serving ways of achieving these outcomes (for example, increase the number of underserved individuals who visit our museum, ensure the appropriate conservation and preservation of the objects under our care, and so on). To be truly viable organizations in the twenty-first century, museums need to not only talk about being part of a larger community, they also need to actually “walk the walk.” For too long, most museums have thought and behaved as if they were isolated jewels, with their inherent value based on their longevity, privilege, or financial worth. Museums have come to appreciate that they are but one section of a large and complex community fabric, in fact, not just one fabric but multiple, intersecting community fabrics —communities of geography (e.g., nation, state, and local), of purpose (e.g., education, social service, culture, entertainment), of interest (e.g., art, history, science), and of commerce (e.g., tourism, education). As the financial challenges of the present reveal, many do not consider museums particularly essential components of any of these various community fabrics. How, then, should museums define and measure their value?
I sincerely believe that the museum visitor experience model described in this book provides a unique and useful way for museums to critically re-examine their role in the communities they serve. In particular, I believe that it opens up new ways to think about issues of institutional impact.
INSTITUTIONAL IMPACT
Just as we have redefined the museum visitor experience as the interaction between visitors and museums, we must redefine how we think about a museum’s impact. The museum is not an island onto itself, but a dynamic interaction between the public and society. As I’ve conceptualized in the figure on page 161, the museum’s value as a composite of two separate, but interwoven sets of inputs—“visitor” and “museum” inputs. The museum’s impact in a community is the sum of the individual perceptions of the museum’s value as determined by the museum visit experiences of thousands of visitors. It is also defined by an abstract societal construct determined by the experiences of visitors to the museum, but equally by the larger prevailing socio-cultural perceptions of what museums are and the potential roles they play in society. Thus, the task of defining as well as influencing, institutional value and impact over the long term need to begin with each institution analyzing how this dynamic relationship uniquely plays out for them. What is the actual value the museum currently provides to each individual through a visit, program, or some other effort? The museum also needs to understand the public perception of its value as an institution within the community. What do the various sectors of the community perceive the museum affords? While appreciating that museums are complex organizations and impact their communities through multiple mechanisms and efforts, for the sake of simplicity, I will focus my discussion primarily on one aspect of the museum—the general public’s in-museum use of exhibitions.
If we knew the answers to the three basic questions of who goes to museums, what they do there, and what meaning they make from the experience, we would gain critical insights into how individuals derive value and benefits from their museum-going experience. Historically, museums have defined their impact from a top-down perspective. As museums over the past twenty-five years have become more educationally focused, institutional impact has increasingly been defined as involving changes in the public’s understanding, attitudes, and behaviors. The leaders of the museum world have determined, usually expressed in their mission, that the goal of the institution is to improve the public’s understanding, appreciation, and/or behavior of art, history, conservation, or science. To achieve this goal, the institution has created exhibitions designed to “educate,” “inspire,” and/or “enlighten” the public. In recent years, museums have engaged in the challenging task of evaluating their success at achieving these goals. For most museums, assertions of impact remain largely rhetorical rather than empirical, but increasingly museums are finding it not only useful, but possible to supplement their rhetoric with measurements of whether a museum visit resulted in changes in the public’s knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the same impact model used by the formal education system. In this system, authorities unilaterally determine what children should know and codify it within standards and curricula. These are then used by teachers as instructional guides to frame what and how children are taught. Finally, children are evaluated to determine whether or not they have learned what they were supposed to have learned. In the past, individual teachers exercised considerable discretion over what content to teach as well as how to evaluate individual children. Today, neither the content nor the student evaluations are primarily left to the discretion of the individual educator. The content and evaluations that really count are those devised and administered by individuals at the county, state, or national level and take the form of standardized, one-size-fits-all assessments. We could debate the pros and cons of this model for the schools, but I would assert that this model is wholly inappropriate for the free-choice learning context of a twenty-first century museum. Although the museum professional staff has a responsibility to define and prescribe the overall content and goals of the institution, the creation of such content and goals without the input and approval of the public makes little sense. In fact, as both the model and the actual data presented in this book demonstrate, the public utilizes museums to achieve the outcomes THEY deem important, NOT what the museum deems important.
What the museum visitor experience model should make clear is that the visiting public uses museums in order to achieve a range of personal goals. Different individuals on different days are motivated to use the museum in order to satisfy a range of different personal, often learning-related outcomes. Some of these personal outcomes involve learning facts and concepts related to art or history or science or conservation, but many do not. As a consequence, the kinds of personal meanings that the public seeks from museums only occasionally align with the kinds of learning outcomes museums profess they are designed to support. If we want to accurately measure the real impact museums achieve, we need to acknowledge these realities and strive to measure the full range of benefits visitors actually derive from their museum visitor experience, not just the benefits the museum supposes they receive.
Equally true is the realization that in order to truly maximize the impact museums have on the public (and by extension their community), it will require a major realignment of institutional goals so that those goals better mesh with the realities of visitor expectations and motivations. The alternative to this voluntary realignment of museum goals will be for funders and the public to come to realize that museums do not presently achieve much of what they claim to achieve—at least not for most of the people who visit, most of the time. We are perilously close to the moment when the “emperor is discovered to have no clothes.”
As much as I admire and respect the job that museums do for all the millions of people they serve every year, I strongly believe that museums need to get better, not just for each visitor but better as institutions. In a world of ever-increasing competition for audience and resources, the two of which are inextricably bound together at the moment, museums need to get better at understanding and serving their visitors. Although museums continue to be extremely popular leisure venues, today’s success cannot be taken for granted. This is particularly true for individual museums, since the success of “museums” as a leisure category has created a proliferation of museum-like entities, all vying for the same finite audiences and resources. If I can make any predictions about the future, it is that without considerable investment and constant improvement, museums are unlikely to retain their current lofty position in the leisure marketplace.
In the past decade we have witnessed a slow but steady erosion in the position of individual museums; visitor numbers have flattened out if not outright declined. Once abundant financial support is now more limited. Governments are cutting back funding and grant support is becoming ever more challenging to acquire. Even individual donations are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and require more effort to maintain even constant levels. As I write this book in 2008, it seems unlikely that the next decade will be any kinder to museums. The current economic situation bodes poorly for all non-profits. By virtue of dwindling resources, it is almost certain that more emphasis will be placed on only supporting organizations that provide “essential services.” If museums cannot make the case that they provide essential services, they will not receive funding. More problematic, if it is discovered that the museums do not actually deliver the services they currently claim to provide, that too will result in diminished funding if not an outright “closing of the doors.”
Call me an optimist, but I believe that if we can change our focus and orientation to be truly visitor-centered, that is truly focused on meeting visitors’ deepest and most important identity-related needs, museums can be viewed as an essential service. Make no mistake, accomplishing this goal will require major changes in the purposes and activities of museums. An enhanced understanding of current and potential audience has to be at the heart of every twenty-first century museum’s rhetoric, actions, and business model.
Are museums currently essential institutions in their community? Ask any museum director, or museum professional and they will without hesitation say, “YES, ABSOLUTELY.” Ask the local mayor or city councilperson the same question and you might get a more equivocal answer. More telling would be to ask the general public that question. Currently, do you as a museum professional want to go before the local government governing board and play on a level playing field with the hospital, rubbish collection, and police force? Do you want to frame your argument by saying that the acquisition of a new work by contemporary artist Jenny Holzer, or the addition of a new giraffe to your breeding population, or the development of another special exhibition on nineteenth-century pioneers, are worth as much to the community as removing the trash, supporting emergency workers, or feeding the homeless? If you don’t think this is what the future portends, then you haven’t been paying attention to current events. Maybe you’ll be lucky and always have sufficient wealthy benefactors who believe in “high culture” and “heritage” but, if not, then it comes back to meeting the needs of the general public.
What the museum visitor experience model tells us is that the public perceives that museums are good for five basic things: 1) the need to satisfy personal curiosity and interest; 2) the wish to engage in a meaningful social experience with someone you care about, in particular children; 3) the aspiration to experience that which is best and most important within a culture; 4) the desire to further specific intellectual needs; and 5) the yearning to immerse one’s self in a spiritually refreshing environment. Of course, there will be a content-related twist to the specific public perceptions for each individual museum, but a desire to acquire a deep and lasting knowledge of particular content, or develop the capacity to save the world, or any of the other lofty goals museums seem to espouse, will not rise to the top of most visitors’ list of what they are primarily seeking in a museum visit. Although there are no doubt variations and possible things missing from this list of outcomes, at least in the English-speaking, developed world and in one Spanish-speaking, developing country, these five outcomes are what the vast majority of the public currently perceive that museums afford. And it goes without saying that not every museum is equally good at supporting all of these benefits. The question each and every museum needs to ask, after they determine how the public currently perceives their specific set of values, is whether this is how you want to be perceived and valued. Is this the niche you wish to be in? If it is not, then you have a lot of work to do. If you accept that it is a reasonable niche, which I believe it should be, then the challenge is how you ensure that your community appreciates that these outcomes are truly essential.
In theory, each of these needs could be viewed as essential functions of a society, but making the case and delivering on that case are what will be fundamental to long-term survival. What would a society be like if there was no place to satiate curiosity, or help children learn, or escape the pressures of a crazy urban world? And, if these are the amenities your institution provides the citizenry, then you need to make sure they are made available to ALL citizens. You need to ensure that each is delivered REALLY well. In the current economic situation, you need to clearly and unambiguously communicate to funders and supporters that these are indeed the benefits your organization provides and be able to back these assertions up with real data.
To be essential, museums need to bring their missions into alignment with the public’s expectations. Then, museums must improve the fit between the needs the public perceives a museum is capable of delivering, presumably influenced by the museum’s mission, and the actual benefits that the museum delivers. The museum visitor experience model doesn’t answer the question of how to accomplish this, but it provides a framework for beginning to get the answers to these questions. The reason why this is true should be obvious. By knowing more about the real reasons visitors utilize our institutions, and more about the real benefits they perceive they derive from those experiences, we can more effectively meet their needs and ensure that they are satisfied customers. Satisfied customers will return and support the museum. Satisfied customers will also help the museum through word-of-mouth recommendations and politically support the museum in good times and bad. But I wouldn’t be advocating this model if I thought all it was going to do was to provide superficial, short-term gains in popularity and support. Rather, I am enthusiastic about this new museum visitor experience model because it promises to give the museum community, for the first time, a truly deep and a valid way to understand how to effectively meet the needs of real, not just imagined museum visitors. Although the model suggests a range of ways to creatively move into the future, change will be difficult and challenging, not the least of these being the need for meaningful assessment.
ASSESSING IMPACT
One of the hallmarks of professional life in the twenty-first century, for both individuals and organizations, is accountability. Accountability is not just limited to ensuring that an organization follows prescribed accounting rules and ensures that all funds are appropriately spent; it is also about how organizations demonstrate they are achieving their goals. This is particularly true for non-profit organizations like museums. In the for-profit world, the ultimate accounting is the financial bottom line—the amount of money earned. In museums, accountability is increasingly measured in the good created. How do you reliably and credibly measure good created? Most museums have never actually done so, but in the twenty-first century, those that do not figure out how, will find themselves out of business. In an increasingly distrustful and competitive society, merely promising to do good no longer suffices.
Continued public and private funding for museums will ultimately be dependent upon evidence of public good accomplished by museums. Society increasingly is demanding that institutions evaluate their performance and provide concrete, tangible evidence of success. Such demands became a legislative reality at the U.S. federal government level with the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) in 1993. This Act required every government agency to establish specific objective, quantifiable, and measurable performance goals for each of its programs and report their success annually to Congress. In the U.K., government-supported museums (which means most museums) must now document Public/Cultural Value. Similar laws exist or are being considered in many other countries.
The demand for accountability is increasingly widespread. Many state and local government agencies have followed the lead of the federal government. Private foundations are including similar language in grants applications. From all sides, museums are receiving a clear message: to successfully compete for public or private funds in an accountability-driven environment, they must develop evaluation practices that provide a compelling picture of the impact of their services. Funders want evidence that something of quality actually happened as a consequence of the programs they support. Such outcomes-based assessments will require institutions to invest more money, more time, and more thought in the assessment process. To do less will not be an option.
Historically, it has been difficult to accurately and validly measure the impact of the museum visitor experience. This has been true for two reasons, the first of which was a lack of appropriate evaluation tools; most “standard” evaluation tools were designed for the realities of schooling rather than those of museums. Although recent advances in understanding how visitors learn within museums coupled with new and better measurement tools—tools specifically designed for use in free-choice learning settings —have helped, results have still not provided all of the ammunition necessary to allow museums to make a compelling case. I would assert the inability to make a clear case for museums has stemmed in large measure from the lack of a valid and reliable model of the museum visitor experience. It’s hard to accurately measure something you don’t understand! If we’re measuring the wrong things, we will not get wonderful results! The museum visitor experience model promises to help overcome this second impediment by enabling museums to more fully and accurately predict and measure visitor outcomes. The model dictates that we need to develop strategies for effectively measuring things like enhanced curiosity, mental and physical rejuvenation, and satisfaction of a sense of cultural “competency.”
It should be clear by now that I advocate determining institutional impact as a measure of the success an institution has in fulfilling each individual visitor’s identity-related visit agenda. The greater the fit between each of hundreds of individuals’ entering expectations and their long-term, post-visit outcomes, the greater the impact a museum could be determined to have achieved. If, as argued above, museums need to bring their missions into alignment with the public’s expectations, then it follows that the goal of assessment will be to develop valid and reliable metrics that determine how successfully this has been accomplished. Implicit in this scenario is that museums will need to make the case to their funders that by aligning their institutional goals with the fundamental needs and expectations of the public, they are performing essential and invaluable service to the community—a service that few other organizations can do as well or as successfully.
The museum visitor experience model provides a clear and logical framework for improving how we as a profession value and measure the success of museums. The changes I have suggested here are unlikely to occur without considerable debate since not everyone will agree with what I have proposed. Should these outcomes really be defined as appropriate and worthy outcomes for museums? Should government and private funders actually be encouraged to re-evaluate their funding priorities to better match the realities described by this model? Currently few funders acknowledge, let alone support, the full range of museum visitor experience outcomes that is suggested by the model. Finally, should museums dramatically alter how they market and support their public activities? All of these changes of course depend ultimately on whether or not the model I have proposed is actually valid. The value of any good model is that it provides reliable and useful predictions. The predictions made by the museum visitor experience model are open to testing and should be tested. So far, the model has held up to scrutiny, but only additional testing will enable us to discover if it’s a sufficiently robust model to justify making it the foundation of a whole new era in museum practice.
FINAL COMMENTS
I offer this model at this time not because I am convinced that it is perfect the way it is—quite the contrary. I know that the current model is a work in progress and, without question, will be found to have flaws. I offer this model because I think it is far enough along in its development to offer some important new insights to the museum community. As we look to the future, I know that there will be a need for changes and revisions, hopefully not to the core premise of the model, but certainly as to how it is applied. For example, I know that the strategies my colleagues and I have used to date for measuring an individual’s identity-related motivations are still quite crude and will need to be improved. As this book nears completion, my students and I have been working on several new approaches to this problem, but no ideal solution has yet emerged. Obviously, how one measures an individual’s identity-related motivations, and thus assigns them to an identity-related category, is a critical issue. I am also not totally convinced that the way I have parsed the universe of museum identity-related motivations is completely correct. Would we be better served by having dozens of categories rather than just five? Is forcing individuals into a single category the best solution even within the current framework? If someone has multiple entering motivations, does a Facilitating Explorer have the same needs and interests as an Exploring Facilitator? Time and presumably, further study will tell the tale. At the moment, the current model seems to make sense and be supported by reliable data. However, more data and more testing of how the model actually works in practice are clearly required.
Without question, the current model has attempted to simplify a complex reality in order to be useable and generalizable. Greater detail and precision would undoubtedly ensure a closer fit to particular situations and types of museums, but it would also result in less fit for others. That might be a worthwhile tradeoff for a particular institution or group of museums to make, but it seems like a bad tradeoff when trying to create a model for something as diverse and heterogeneous as museums. Perhaps, the next generation of the museum visitor experience model would be a whole series of models, such as a zoo visitor experience model, an art museum visitor experience model, and a natural area/park visitor experience model. More useful, perhaps, would be a more fine-grained model, the “Museum X” visitor experience model which would be tightly focused on the unique set of visitors utilizing one institution.
I have no doubt that there will be changes in the use and design of the museum visitor experience model. Such changes are inevitable, particularly changes that enable the model to incorporate greater complexity and detail. Without question, there is need for additional research to determine if the model holds for visitors to the many museums located in the less-developed world. To date most of the research has been on visitors to museums in English-speaking parts of the developed world, though as mentioned above, these same categories seemed to work with individuals visiting art, history, and science museums in Medellin, Colombia as well. And even within this context, although there seems to be evidence that the model works for individuals from all manner of socio-economic and cultural affinities, this too requires further investigation.
Additionally, it is important to point out that the model as it currently exists is just a snapshot of the museum visitor and leisure preference realities of today. Over time, the identity-related needs and benefits the public perceives that museums support will undoubtedly shift. They may shift because of changes museums make or because of changes in society; either way they are unlikely to persist unchanged. I am hopeful that this book will result in changes in the nature of what museums offer the public that are more consistent with the perceived needs of their publics. In any case, return in twenty years, if not sooner, and the identity-related visit categories currently described by the model may well be quite different. However, if the basic outlines of this museum visitor experience model do indeed prove to be robust and useful, those shifts will be easy to track and the model will be easily modified to fit new realities.
Finally, I perceive several next steps. I have already stated that a major short-term goal will be to test the ability of the model to improve the experiences of real visitors in real museums. Even as I write this book, I am aware of many institutions that have begun to apply the principles of the model to everyday practice. It’s still too soon to know how these efforts will work, but without question, these and other efforts will soon determine the worth of this model for improving museum practice. Similarly, if I am fortunate enough to have written a book that is noticed, than I can count on my colleagues in the research and evaluation community testing my ideas to determine if they are as reasonable as I have asserted. I look forward to these efforts to test and replicate my findings. Because this is the first really predictive model of the museum visitor experience, I envision researchers for the first time being able to begin to create computer-based simulations of the museum visitor experience; in fact, I hope to be one of those researchers. If successful, like any good computer simulation, these models would allow museum professionals to “electronically” test exhibit and program ideas, as well as marketing and fund-raising ideas prior to actually investing their time and resources in the real thing. And lastly, suspending disbelief and proceeding with the assumption that this is a worthwhile and robust model of the museum visitor experience, I believe that we will soon see the need for creating increasingly sophisticated strategies for measuring the public’s entering identity-related motivations and devising strategies for adjusting, in real time, to this information.
No matter what happens, I am hopeful that the ideas presented in this book will stimulate discussions and possibly even debates within the museum community. Such conversations will certainly be interesting, and hopefully result in better museums. Since we are all going to spend the rest of our lives in the future, we might as well work towards making it as good and interesting a future as possible.