Making Meaningful Connections: Inspiring New Report from Irvine and Helicon

Our work to transform the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History into a participatory and community-centered place has been heavily supported by the James Irvine Foundation. I've learned a lot from Irvine Foundation staff and partners directly. But one of my favorite things they do is remarkably unpersonalized: they produce killer reports.

Their newest one, Making Meaningful Connections, was written by Holly Sidford, Alexis Frasz, and Marcy Hinand at Helicon. The report is a slim 12 pages on the common characteristics of arts organizations that successfully and continuously engage diverse audiences. It is paired with a thoughtful infographic (part of which is shown at the top here) that summarizes their findings.

Making Meaningful Connections is not riddled with jargon and academic theory. Nor is it packed with juicy examples and case studies. Instead, it's a tight, inspiring, and reasonably original brief on the strategies that lead to sustained involvement of diverse people with arts organizations. It's the first report in a long time that I am sharing with my board. (The last one was on arts innovation and change, also from Irvine.)

Here are three aspects of Making Meaningful Connections that I like most:

• New participant relationships are like new friendships. They take time, curiosity, respect and the willingness to be changed by the relationship. The report starts with an elegant friendship analogy (see the box on page 4) that breaks down the challenges of genuine arts engagement in a clear, relatable, and motivating way.
• Targeted programming is not enough. The authors name the reality that one-off programs, exhibits, or shows for specific groups do little to change the mix of participants longterm. Interestingly, they argue instead that structural change--including but not exclusively programmatic change--is what makes the difference in participant makeup. They also acknowledge that some organizations are happy with their participant makeup, and that these multi-faceted organizational shifts are voluntary for those who want them.
• The characteristics of successful organizations involve deepening, not adding. So often, these kinds of reports recommend a long list of changes and new things to add to your work. It can feel defeating or downright impossible to integrate them into already-strapped schedules. But this report was developed based on existing organizations and practices, looking for common characteristics as opposed to new directions. The recommendations read less like "thou shalt do this new thing" and more like "deepen and embed in this thing you already have." We all have missions. We all have leaders. We all have business models. We can all shift within our existing worlds. 

And here are two things I wonder about:

• Universalist tone. This report could come from--and go--anywhere. I assume that's intentional, and for the most part, it's a good thing. The report is brief, clear, and open. If you are reading this report in Manchester or Malaysia or Memphis, you will find meaningful and useful content. On the other hand, the Irvine Foundation makes grants specifically in California. When Josephine Ramirez, Program Director for the Arts, introduced the report on the Irvine blog, she did so in the context of a state that is now 55% Latino and Asian. Nowhere in the report itself is there a comparable framing statement about why it is urgent to consider this work now, in California and around the world. Perhaps it's self-evident. But especially for organizations where cultural competency is in its infancy, those starting points and case statements are still necessary. Then again, Irvine made that statement pretty clearly in a previous report. 
• Recommendation to bring practices "into balance." I didn't find it meaningful to imagine an institutional "balance" of the five recommended practices (welcoming spaces, relevant programming, respectful relationships, analysis for improvement, business model). I agree that all are important, and that they are interrelated, but I didn't see a rationale in going for parity. I'd like to understand more about the basis for that recommendation.

What did you get out of Making Meaningful Connections?

Disinterested or Excluded? Two Very Different Forms of Non-Participation

"I hate museums."

Imagine two people saying this.

For one of them, the statement is grounded in disinterest. She's visited museums, she didn't enjoy them, she's more of a sports person, it's not part of her life, it's not her thing.

For the other, the statement is grounded in exclusion. He didn't feel welcome in museums, feels like they aren't for him, he wasn't invited, it isn't comfortable.

How can you tell the difference between these two people?

It's almost impossible to do so. They are likely to use similar language--language of disinterest--in describing what turns them off. It's safer to say "I'm not into it" than "I feel excluded." Sometimes the difference isn't even apparent to the person speaking. People can mask exclusion as disinterest unconsciously as a protective measure against what they are really experiencing.

From the institutional standpoint, this difference matters. It matters when we think about who our organizations are for and what we are willing to do to invite those people to participate. It may be ridiculous for an institution to be "for everyone." But how do we decide who it's ok to disregard?

I think it's ok to strategically disregard people who have disinterest in the content or format of your work. It's not ok to ignore people who have interest but feel excluded.

It's not only politically problematic to ignore them--it's also a bad business practice. Excluded yet interested people are potential participants who can and will be engaged if the organization is more open to them.

I fear that too often, professionals mis-identify exclusion as disinterest. It's easy to do. We mirror what we hear from non-participants about "not liking it." We stick with those who like it and feel included. We perpetuate the exclusion. And then we wonder why some people don't show up.

What's the alternative? We can probe deeper. We can start looking for signs of interest and building on them. We can start identifying the code words that turn "it's not for me" into "I choose to spend my time elsewhere" versus "you made me feel unwelcome." We can be ok with disinterest. We can work on inclusion. We can make a change where it will matter.

Let's Stop Talking about What People Want and Need As If They Are Different (and we can tell how)

"Our job is not to give people what they want but what they need."

How many times have you heard this phrase in the context of cultural institutions? For me, the answer is too many. I'm calling this phrase out. I think it's presumptuous, disingenuous, and downright depressing.

It's presumptuous to suggest that we know what people "need" in a cultural context.

I know what my dog needs. He needs two cups of food per day. He wants a million cups of food per day. I think it is completely reasonable for me to give him not what he wants but what he needs.

I know what my baby needs. She needs to nap when she gets cranky, even though she keeps flailing her limbs. I think it is completely reasonable for me to wrap her up and put her to bed--to give her not what she wants but what she needs.

Very, very few museum visitors are in the "dog and baby" category. They are human beings. They are complex. I've spent a lot of time reading and engaging in visitor research, and I don't feel like I have a grasp on what visitors need separate from what they want. Does a mom want a program that includes her kids, or does she need it? Does an artist want an exhibition that stimulates his work in new ways, or does he need it? We spend a lot of time at my institution talking with people about their interests, needs, and abilities, but that doesn't mean that we know what an individual needs on a particular day, a particular visit. I don't know if someone need grounding in core content or exposure to new practices. I don't know if they need to be empowered or provoked. I do know a bit about what they respond to, what they ignore, and what it looks like when they really get turned on by something. But what do they need? I assume they are just as changeable and complex as any person in that regard.

It's really important to be able to articulate what we need to achieve our institutional missions. An organization with an public engagement mission has very different needs than one with a mission that focuses on original research. Some organizations need to focus on 3rd graders. Some need to conduct programs in multiple languages.

We may know what we need to achieve our missions. But that doesn't mean we know what visitors/audiences/humans need.

We ask funders to give general operating support to our organizations because we feel we know best what we need and want to be able to achieve. Why wouldn't we afford our participants the same respect with regard to their needs and wants? (For more on this in the world of poverty, check out this commentary on Give Directly.)

It's disingenuous to use the word "need" to mask our true intentions. In my experience, the "needs" of audiences often look suspiciously like the "wants" of the people speaking.

When I ask what the phrase "don't give people what they want, give them what they need" means, I am often told that we should not be pandering to people's expressed desires but presenting them with objects and experiences that challenge them and open up new ways of seeing the world.

I agree. It is incredibly valuable for cultural institutions to present experiences that might be surprising, unexpected, or outside participants' comfort zones. But I don't typically hear this phrase deployed to argue in favor of a risky program format or an unusual piece of content. I don't hear this phrase accompanied by evidence-based articulation of "needs" of audiences. Instead, I hear this phrase used to defend traditional formats and content in the face of change. I hear "don't give people what they want, give them what I want."

I will always remember when Robin Dowden of the Walker Art Center told me that she knew their teen website was working because she thought it was ugly and impossible to navigate. What teenagers wanted--and needed--was a website with unicorns and sparkly text. That site was not optimized for Robin's experience as an adult. It takes courage to embrace what diverse people want/need, especially when it flies in the face of traditional culture or standards.

It's depressing to imply that culture is not what people "want." Cultural experiences should be a pleasure. They can also be educational, challenging, empowering, political... but they must first be something people want. If we give up on the idea that people should WANT what we have to offer, we give up on the idea that what we have is desirable. Talking about what people need is like talking about going to the dentist. I don't want to be the dentist. I want to offer the most desirable experience possible--even if it's not what people walked in thinking they were seeking.


I'd vastly prefer if we used a phrase like, "Our job is to connect the familiar to the unfamiliar, and in doing so, ignite a passion for how diverse, exciting, and essential art [or history, or science] can be."

Or maybe something as simple as, "We do what we need to do to accomplish our mission. We think it's important. Here's why."

Who Counts? Grappling with Attendance as a Proxy for Impact

When you count attendance to your museum, do you include:

• people who eat in the cafe?
• people who rent the facility for private events?
• people who engage with your content online?
• participants in offsite outreach programs? 
• volunteers? 

This summer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published the kind of "how sausage is made" story that rarely gets written about the arts. It's about museum attendance and how the five big, free museums in St. Louis count it. There's quite a range. Summertime concerts at the history museum? Those count. Outdoor movies at the art museum? Nope. At the St. Louis Science Center, the focus of the article, there was a particularly creative perspective on attendance, including numbers for offsite board meetings, parades where staff made a showing, and attendance at a school next door. The only form of engagement lacking in the article is online participation--which for many museums, could yield the highest numbers of all.

Even if you consider some of these counting strategies to be egregious, the basic question is still relevant: who counts? When I reflected on our museum, I realized we have some inconsistencies in how we calculate attendance. For us, annual attendance includes programmatic activities onsite and off (about 10% of our programming is conducted at community sites). That means daytime visitors, event participants, school tours, and outreach program participants. It does not include facility rentals, meetings, fundraising events, nor people who might see us at a community event but not directly engage.

What's missing from this picture? I think you could reasonably argue that we should be counting:

• researchers who come in to access information in the archives
• people who rent the museum for a private event that includes a curator/artist tour of exhibitions
• kids in museum summer camps
• people who visit the historic cemetery that we manage
• people who talk with us online about historic photos we share or blog posts about the collection

And then there are the weird inconsistencies. Why do we count participants in an art activity for families at a community center but not members of the Rotary Club to whom I give a presentation about the museum? Why do we count visitors who tour the galleries chatting with their friends but not visitors who tour the galleries chatting with a staff member (i.e. as part of a meeting)? 

This doesn't even get to the potential parsing of people's intentions. If someone comes to an exhibition opening for the free food, do they count? If a kid gets dragged to a museum with their parents, do they count? If someone has an epiphany about art outside the museum, do they count?

Probe too deeply and the question gets absurd. The more important question is not WHO counts but WHAT counts. Internal to an individual museum, relative attendance--changes over time or program--can yield useful information. But if you try to make meaning out of attendance comparisons across institutions, you start juggling apples and oranges. While many institutions separate attendance by program area, I don't know of any that separate attendance into "impressions," "light engagement," "deep engagement," etc. - categories that might actually have meaning. 

What is meaningful in the context of achieving our mission? That's the number we should be capturing.

The Relationship Between Attendance and Impact

How can we measure impact? That's a huge question. Let's look at it in the narrow context of the relationship between attendance and impact.

What is the information value of attendance? Attendance does a good job representing how popular an institution is, how used it is, and how those two things vary over different times of day, days of the week, times of year, and types of programs.  

But does attendance demonstrate mission fulfillment? Unless your mission is "to engage X number of people," probably not. For some institutions, like the MCA Denver, attendance is seen as a very poor measure of impact. But for almost all museums (even MCA Denver), attendance is correlated with impact in some way. 

For attendance to be correlated with impact, you have to find a way to articulate a theory of change that connects attendance to your mission (inspiration, learning, civic participation, etc.). And then, you have to be able to calculate a conversion factor that relates the number of people who attend to the number for whom the mission is fulfilled.  

Imagine managing a shoe store. Your mission is to sell shoes. Attendance is the total number of people who walk in the door. Of those people, 10% actually buy shoes. That means 10% is your conversion factor; if you want to sell 5 pairs of shoes, you need fifty people to walk through the door.

Now let's say your mission isn't just to sell shoes, but to build relationships with customers who will love your shoes and buy more of them in the future. Maybe the conversion factor from first sale to repeated sales is 20%. Now you have fifty people who walk through the door, five who buy shoes, and one who will be a longtime customer.

Now let's turn back to museums. The St. Louis Science Center's mission is to "ignite and sustain lifelong science and technology learning." What's the conversion factor from a single visit to that mission? 

I'd start by splitting the "igniting" from the "sustaining." You could argue that any single visit or interaction with the Science Center--at the facility, out in the community, online--could have the spark of ignition. But sustaining lifelong learning requires a different level of commitment. That count could include people who are visitors/members for 10+ years. Or volunteers who participate on a weekly basis. Or students who visit at some point and go on to careers in science and technology. 

It's not easy, but the museum could define the indicators that it considers representative of sustained learning. It could count those incidences. With some effort, you could calculate conversion factors from igniting to sustaining for each major program area. And if you knew the conversion factor for general attendance from igniting to sustaining, you could actually generate an estimate of how many of the kids zooming around the facility are likely to sustain a lifelong interest in science.

Looking at it in this way would also allow institutions to expand beyond reductive "all about attendance" approaches to demonstrating impact. You could argue that some of the most important work of "igniting and sustaining lifelong science and technology learning" has nothing to do with attendance to the science center. It might involve producing ad campaigns linking science to community issues, or advocating for job training programs in technology, or designing curriculum for community colleges. And again, if you could designate indicators for the kinds of learning impacts possible through these efforts and the conversion factors from igniting to sustaining, you could count and present them. 

So perhaps the St. Louis Science Center's annual report could look like this:

"Our mission is to ignite and sustain lifelong science and technology learning. We know that not every spark leads to a blaze, so we focus on igniting as many sparks as possible and making strategic investments in programs that are likely to sustain learning for the long term. 

We ignited science and technology learning this year through ongoing exhibits, educational programs, outreach in the community, and online interactions, which reached 3 million people. These sparks grew into sustained lifelong learning for at least 400 people, who got involved in local technology hobbyist projects, who pursued careers in science and technology, and helped us facilitate learning experiences as volunteers at the museum. 

We also focused this year on working with the countywide adult education agency to start an intergenerational science program at three senior centers throughout St. Louis. While this program only involves 40 people per site, all of them are participating in the kind of deep science engagement that is proven to lead to lifelong science and technology learning."

Too unwieldy or unorthodox for funders? Maybe in the beginning. But in an age of nonprofit accountability and increasingly sophisticated evaluation strategies, I think this kind of approach could be useful. What do you think? 

Thinking about User Participation in Terms of Negotiated Agency

Early this month, I got the chance to hear legendary game designer Will Wright (Sim City) give a talk. I've followed Wright's work for years because of his unique perspective on the potential for game-players to be game-makers - in other words, to co-create the gaming experience.

In his talk, Wright said one thing that really stood out:

Game players have a negotiated agency that is determined by how the game is designed.

In other words, the more constrained the game environment, the less agency the player has. The more open, the more agency. Think about the difference between Pacman and Grand Theft Auto. Both games have a "gamespace" in which they are played. Both games have rules. But Grand Theft Auto invites the player to determine their own way of using the space and engaging with the rules. The player's agency is not total, but it is significant.

"Negotiated agency" strikes me as a really useful framework in which to talk about visitor/audience participation in the arts. "Negotiation" implies a respectful relationship between institution (or artist) and user. The institution initiates the negotiation with a set of opportunities and constraints. But users play a role via their own agency--both in how they engage and when they break the rules.

Sometimes the negotiation works beautifully. You offer visitors markers and tape and a wall, and they agree tacitly only to write on the tape and not on the wall itself.

Sometimes the negotiation is contested. You tell people they can't take photographs in the gallery or the performance, but the phones sneak out, covertly or defiantly, to reassert personal control of the experience. Patrons clap between movements. Visitors talk over the tour guide.

Sometimes the negotiation can be exploited for artistic means. The theater is dark and the artist breaks the fourth wall and asks for conversation. The symphony conductor asks everyone to raise their phones and join the orchestra. The museum invites art-making in the elevator. This is a kind of negotiation jui-jitsu that can create art through creative tension.

In my experience, this negotiation works best if we acknowledge people's agency and seek ways to create something surprising and high-value through it.

And so I humbly submit two questions to ask yourself when thinking about user participation:

1. What is our negotiating stance in developing this relationship with participants? How can we make it a win-win?
2. How will participants seek to assert their agency in the experience? Will we encourage these activities, denounce them, or divert them?

Reflections on a Weekend with Ze Frank and His Online Community

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Or that visitors form a spontaneous "laugh circle" on the floor. Or that we take a group photo together at the end of the day.

Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This past weekend, in conjunction with our exhibition about Ze Frank's current participatory project, A Show, we hosted "Ze Frank Weekend"--a quickie summer camp of workshops, activities, presentations, and lots of hugging. It was an opportunity for people who participate with Ze Frank's projects online to come together in real space and connect with him and with each other.

It was pretty freaking amazing. About 700 people participated over two days, including some who had traveled to Santa Cruz from London, Indonesia, and across the US. The group was mostly young (teens to thirties) and nerd-diverse: a little bit punk, a little bit hacker, a little bit craft grrl. There were two guys with rainbow beards who did not previously know each other. There were some locals who stumbled in unaware, but mostly, this was an insider's event for people who know and love Ze's particular brand of emotional connection mediated through online participation. To get a sense of what it felt like for participants, check out this great video by one visitor from afar about his experience.

A few things I learned/observed/was impressed by:

A spirit of inclusion, generosity, and welcome permeated the event. We were pretty nervous about the unknowns going into the weekend. Ze had issued an invite to tens of thousands of people online, and we had no idea how many people would attend, and who they are. What we DID know is that the people coming would be connected through work that focuses on sharing intense and not always comfortable emotions online. I was concerned about how we could welcome people into the museum in a way that acknowledged the enormous risk they were taking in showing up in a foreign city and space to connect with people they only sort of knew in an online space. 

Online to onsite migration isn't always easy. I feared that the event would feel cliquey and wouldn't represent the creative, inclusive spirit of Ze's work. But three things made the event a success in this regard:

1. Ze was amazing. He gently acknowledged the fundamental weirdness of meeting people in real-life, in confronting their "fleshiness," giving voice to anyone else's concerns about over-stimulation in the space. Ze was really hands-on with everyone, giving hugs, taking photos, jumping in to do activities with participants. Even though for many of the participants, Ze is a celebrity of epic proportions, he did everything he could to make the event about them and their engagement and not about him. 
2. The activities had a really low barrier to entry. We collaborated with Ze to develop activities throughout the weekend that were lightweight, fun, and encouraged low-key social interaction--exactly the kinds of activities that we have found encourage social bridging with strangers. When people walked in, they received a program and a sheet to collect finishing stamps (unique marks created by participants at one activity station) from other participants. The sheet gave people a lightweight tool to use in social interaction, to trade and share stamps. And the program helped people feel like they knew what was going on. Again and again, we tried to balance the wackiness and spontaneity of the event with the surety that people were in the right place, that we could help them, etc.
3. Our volunteers and staff--and the participants!--rocked. Our regular museum volunteers partnered with new volunteers drawn from Ze Frank's online community, which created a nice bridge between people who knew the museum and people who knew the community and its spirit. Participants who felt more confident modeled generous behavior and engaged others. I was so proud to see how our overall ethos of participation and social bridging was manifest in making the experience really wonderful for everyone.  

The museum itself was well-integrated into the event. In some ways, this event reminded me of the Ontario Science Centre's YouTube Meetup in 2008--a real-time, physical event to support an online community. One of the concerns at the YouTube Meetup was the disconnect between the museum and the participation; for many attendees, the science center just became a venue for a social experience. In this case, because our current exhibition includes a gallery of things made by Ze Frank's community, it was natural for weekend participants to be enthralled by and want to engage with the exhibition itself. Also, our museum-wide approach to participation suited this community well; they really enjoyed exploring other floors and participating in activities that had nothing to do with Ze Frank except in the ways that our philosophy and his are well-aligned. I loved meeting so many people who were surprised and delighted by the participatory approach of our museum--it made it feel like this was a place "for them" instead of a place that was hosting them.

As always, I learned a lot from Ze Frank's unique approach to community participation. One of the regrets of this project for me is that Ze and I have had so little time to really talk about how we think about engaging people in active participation--we've just been busy making it happen. But during the weekend, Ze gave a couple talks that opened up new pathways for me, especially around designing participatory experiences that spread and grow. A couple of key points I got from him:

1. Make sure to develop prompts or projects that are both interesting to DO and to experience as an audience. This is something I strongly subscribe to--a huge percentage of any audience is more likely to spectate than to contribute. But on the web, it's even more important than in a museum. In a museum, if something is appealing to watch, a person might share it by taking a photo or talking about it with a friend. Online, if something is appealing, a person can share it in a million ways via social media. Ze talked about having a personal filter on project ideas that really focuses on ensuring that the activity AND the resulting content is appealing to share.
2. To get lots of participation, always celebrate the human quality of the work. Ze pointed out that many participatory projects that operate as contests end up focusing on a narrow set of "best" work that can exclude broad participation. When Ze described his Young Me Now Me project, in which people replicated photos of themselves as children, he explained that he really encouraged people not to focus on getting the props or costume right but instead to focus on getting the expressions right. By focusing on that human element of self-expression, people felt that the activity was open to them regardless of their ability to set up a scene or take a great photograph. This point is a really interesting extension of my focus on personalization and using individual experiences as a starting point for community participation. Broad participation is not the goal of every project, but I found Ze's framing here a useful salve to the frequently espoused and flawed idea that "to get lots of participation, make the activity stupidly easy."

All in all, a beautiful and stimulating weekend. You can see more comments from participants here and here and see a photo set from one participant here.

Defining Impact Beyond Attendance Numbers at the MCA Denver

I've always been a bit confused when people talk about the impact of a museum or arts institution as being about "more than numbers." I understand that there are shallow and deep experiences. I understand that some museum offer extraordinary, intimate programs. I understand online vs. onsite. I understand that some shows draw more people than others.

But at the end of the day, attendance is a completely reasonable measuring stick for engagement. Low attendance is often a sign of tepid community involvement or interest. When someone says, "it's not about numbers," I hear "our attendance is inadequate and we want to distract you with this other thing we are doing." In my experience, organizations that are doing well and are proud of their work don't feel the need to justify or compensate for their attendance.

But. Two weeks ago, I had an experience that made me understand and respect a different approach to numbers and impact. I was visiting with Adam Lerner, Director and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The MCA Denver has had a big impact on the art world with its fresh approach to programming, and it is located in a large city with a vibrant art scene. So I was surprised to hear its annual attendance is about 50,000.

Because Adam's a friend, I could be impolite and ask him about it. He told me the overall goal of the museum and its impact is not so much about attendance inside the building but the extent to which the museum itself is a creative producer whose work infuses the city. Adam and his colleagues are more like a conceptual art collective than arts administrators. They produce work, and they measure success by the extent to which it is seen/discussed/debated/loved/hated--both by people who directly experience it and those who do not. Adam encourages his staff to develop programming as "tight stories that can be shared, even with those who won't attend."

For example, when I was visiting, the MCA was about to host Art Meets Beast, a two-day festival of bison butchering, meals, and lectures that slams together contemporary art and the spirit of the American West in an original way. Adam told me he cares just as much about people who hear about Art Meets Beast and associate with MCA as people who actually attend. It makes sense. His goal is for people to have a new idea about a museum, or art, or the West. He doesn't care what kind of engagement has to happen for them to get the idea.

Adam described his vision for the MCA Denver's impact this way:

I often think about a performance I attended at my college when I was studying in England in 1990. It was early in the school year, email had only recently become available and I had just spent a couple of hours in the college computer lab with other foreign students corresponding with friends back home, composing DOS messages in glowing white text on black screens. In the evening, I walked across the plaza to the auditorium for the performance along with all the other foreign students who had nothing else going on. The show was billed as a comedy and it started off more or less like a stand-up comedy act. But the performer gradually became more and more active and theatrical. He also became increasingly lewd and at some point began shouting manically at the audience, building up to a finale, where he turned his back on the audience, dropped his trousers and bent over so that only his bare, white behind was visible under the spotlight on stage. Then, as if trying to prove that he was capable of going far too far, he took out a Roman candle, shoved it in his butt, and lit the fuse, so sparks and flares began flying out towards the stupefied audience. 

While this was happening, all I could think was that those white flares flying through the air would become hundreds of email messages launched from the computer lab the next day. The association was instantaneous, as if the recurring bursts from his butt were electronic messages themselves containing the words: “You wouldn’t believe what I saw last night…” And the insight I had at that moment stayed with me. 

Now, over twenty years later, I think about that event as a kind of ghastly myth at the origin of what I am continually trying to create at the museum. I am interested in the way that art and every other creative act have the power to ignite stories. Beyond the visitors who directly experience the art and the imagination of the museum, I care as much about the people who are see our signals from a distance, who are thereby inspired and energized by the sense that there is something extraordinary happening here.

It sounds unorthodox. It sounds wild. But it also sounds like a logically consistent reason NOT to focus on attendance.

I wish there were more organizations like MCA Denver, with thoughtful and powerful definitions of success that may or may not include attendance. What drives me crazy is the folks who say "it's not about the numbers," but don't have a Roman candle metaphor or other set of criteria for how they define their goals. If you are really about kids growing up with your museum, measure frequency of attendance over time. If you are about adults reenergizing their lives through creative play, measure happiness and workshop attendance. If you are about people getting in touch with local history, measure archive research requests and visits to local historic sites.

This whole experience got me thinking about how we measure success at our museum in Santa Cruz. For me, attendance is a big factor. Our vision is to be a "thriving, central gathering place." Accomplishing that goal requires many diverse people who actively participate in our space with each other. It means people becoming members and feeling community ownership. It means producing dynamic programming that is relevant to Santa Cruz County.

But we also have a social mission to build social capital through bridging experiences at and beyond the museum. For us, the crux questions are often, "did you meet someone new [through a museum experience]?" "Did you encounter something that surprised you?" Those questions address our goal of bringing people from diverse walks of life together. And one of my jobs is to find a way to describe, measure, and trumpet that as much as we do attendance or membership figures.

What's the Roman candle metaphor for your measure of success?

Introducing Loyalty Lab

A woman walks into your museum. She's visited a few times before, and you vaguely recognize her as the lady who loved bubble painting, thought the bike sculpture was funny and didn't like the video installation. Last time she had a kid with her, and he got chalk all over his hands from the mosaic activity they did with a volunteer. They wrote a comment about their experience that got turned into a bird by other visitors in the public sculpture hanging in the middle of the museum. You remember seeing them stand in front of the magic mirror in the history gallery, laughing as they made themselves into giants in the glass.

In the admission log today, she is registered as a tick mark under the column marked "General." That's it. No information about who she is, why she's here, what she's looking for, and what she gets out of her connection to the museum. No memory of her relationship with us.

Our museum has a big challenge when it comes to tracking and rewarding participation. Like a lot of small museums, at the MAH staff and community members build relationships on a daily basis. Staff members invite visitors to help write exhibit labels, create art installations, and give opinions on upcoming programs. Visitors become volunteers and take the lead on new projects and activities. Visitors tell staff members and volunteers again and again how their lives are changing because of their involvement with the museum.

This is wonderful and maddening at the same time. It is wonderful to see the uptick in membership and donations and the positive energy from people who come in the door. It is maddening to have no way to track or intentionally encourage these relationships to grow. Like many small museums, the MAH cannot afford expensive ticketing or membership software systems. We have email newsletters and memberships and conversations, but none of those things talk to each other. Our computers are amnesiacs when it comes to participation. We have very high ability to form relationships with visitors, but very low ability to capitalize on those interactions.

With the support of the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, we're starting a new project called Loyalty Lab to change that. In the Loyalty Lab, we will develop a series of low-tech, low-cost strategies and systems for small institutions to track, celebrate, and act on personal interactions with visitors. I'm not talking about RFID chips for every visitor or a Nike+ system to track their every move. I'm talking about human-scale, simple, delightful ways to acknowledge people's involvement and encourage them to go deeper. It could be loyalty cards. It could be charm bracelets. It could be free hugs. We want to be as creative as possible in exploring the options.

Our goals are to:

• Measure and increase membership acquisition and renewal 
• Measure and encourage repeat visitation 
• Increase participant perception of the MAH as a friendly place with high community value

And we want to do it with you, too. We've created a little blog that we will use to track our project openly. It's starting with a workshop tomorrow with Adaptive Path, an experience design firm that focuses on mapping "customer journeys" and developing tools that enable users to more enjoyably and successfully navigate the offerings of the business or organization. In museum terms, that means understanding how visitors hear about us, why they come, what they do when they are here, and what happens after they leave. It means finding the points along the way where we lose people, and the opportunities for us to track and celebrate people's deepening involvement. You can learn more about this process from an Adaptive Path slideshow here.

This is a year-long project for us at the MAH. We'll go from research to prototyping to final design from now until early summer of 2013. We'd love to have you join us as contributors to the Loyalty Lab blog or just follow along and comment on our progress. We've already heard from one museum--the Boston Children's Museum--where they are experimenting with a "V.I.F." program (Very Important Family) to reward repeat family engagement. I know there are other organizations--museums and beyond--playing with innovative approaches to membership, pricing, and tracking to support and encourage deeper relationships. The goal here is for all of us to learn and experiment together.

How do you think about loyalty and relationship-building in your organization?

17 Ways We Made our Exhibition Participatory

Going to MAH and seeing the LOVE exhibition on First Friday was a wonderful experience. It made me think in ways that I haven't before about the relation of art--as expressive culture--to democracy. It was fascinating to see people--across social differences--responding to representations of love in the paintings, images, objects and narratives that were part of the installation. It was exhilarating to see them inspired to create their own meanings in response: lovers whispering together in alcoves, people of all ages writing and drawing on walls and post-its, children painting, everyone sitting rapt before screens.
--Helene Moglen, professor of literature, UCSC 

After a year of tinkering, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History is now showing an exhibition, All You Need is Love, that embodies our new direction as an institution. It is multi-disciplinary, incorporates diverse voices from our community, and provides interactive and participatory opportunities for visitor involvement. The exhibition is far from perfect, but it's a big step towards reflecting the "thriving, central gathering place" of our strategic vision.

This post focuses on one aspect of the exhibition: its participatory and interactive elements. We experimented with many different forms of visitor participation throughout the building, trying to balance social and individual, text-based and artistic, cerebral and silly. With one exception, no single activity cost more than $30 to produce/maintain. We developed and prototyped everything in-house with staff and interns. Pull up an armchair for a tour of our participatory hits, misses, and related discoveries. (Note: you can view these photos of the exhibition on Flickr here.)

Content Development

While most of the participatory components to the exhibition are products that are visitor-facing, there were a few ways we made our development process participatory in terms of collecting and curating content:

• We partnered with two local newspapers--the Good Times and the Sentinel--to run contests looking for people with stories of crazy things they'd done for love and love rituals with family and friends. The best of the results were published on the papers online and included in the exhibition complete with first person labels, photographs, and artifacts.
• We collaborated with two local organizations--the Rebele Homeless Family Shelter and Dominican Oaks retirement community--to conduct oral histories and produce a small audio and photo-based exhibit on maintaining love in tough situations. Here's a photo of one of the retired couples who came with their family to celebrate her 80th birthday in the exhibition.
• We invited museum members and a few community members/organizations to create small exhibition components about unique love experiences with family, friends, teammates, romantic partners, and pets. 
• We invited a private art school to fill a very public wall with paintings made by students in response to the question, "How would you depict love?" This is the most visible community component in the exhibition--a huge wall of 60 paintings hung salon-style, including a giant Marilyn Monroe, several superheroes, cats, goth girls--whatever said "love" to a range of kids. The inclusion and prominence of amateur art in the museum makes a complicated statement that is worth a whole other blog post.
• We prototyped the most complicated interactives (the Love Styles quiz and Hearts to Hearts game) with visitors in the months leading up to opening. Because our visitation is highest during our monthly First Friday events, we used those as opportunities for testing. We called the prototypes "activities," got lots of participants, and people loved giving their feedback and seeing the prototypes evolve over a couple months. We've continued to do this for future exhibitions.

The Love Lounge

I LOVE... entryway.

On the first floor of the museum, just as you walk in, you encounter a small gallery that we have transformed into a participatory, creative space. This gallery has always been tough for exhibitions--it serves as a pass-through to the classroom, and during evening events, people pour through it on their way to and from classroom activities. We decided that instead of fighting this use, we should embrace it and reposition the gallery as an informal, welcoming space for active engagement with content. We also felt that it was useful to "front load" participation so that people understand right off the bat that they can engage actively at the MAH. So many museum exhibitions relegate the participatory bits in at the end. We wanted to welcome people in a participatory way, so that hopefully, they would carry that same energy and enthusiasm for active engagement upstairs.

The content of the Love Lounge focuses on individuals from Santa Cruz County, historic and current, and the crazy things they have done for love. Some are conceptual (i.e. interracial marriage, keeping a family together while homeless) and others are more immediate (i.e. making a special gift). The content was developed in a participatory way but is presented traditionally via artifacts, text, photos, and audio.

There are three participatory components for visitors to the Love Lounge:

• An entrance doorway with spray-painted I LOVE ________ that people can complete with chalk. People love this and it's easy to manage with a sponge. The content is fairly surface-level, but it creates a nice feel when you walk in. 
• A wall on which people can write answers to the question: "What's the craziest thing you've done for love?" with sharpies. This is the smash hit of the room and the most risky thing in the whole exhibition. What kind of crazy museum gives people sharpies and lets them write on a wall? As it turns out, the wall is fairly manageable and generates fabulous stories. The biggest problem is the sharpies running out; visitors pound them into the walls, and they have to be replaced every two weeks. We also have problems with kids scrawling on the bottom (you can see the height below which the wall becomes a toddler playground) and occasionally, people writing inappropriate things. We haven't had too much swearing, but there are rare moments of violence. "Murder" is not something you want to see on this kind of wall. We manage the wall by repainting it when it gets full (about every 3 weeks, and yes, we photograph it first) and spot-repainting anything offensive the day it is noticed. The content truly is amazing. Every time we repaint, I'm sad to see many of the stories go--but then I'm always overwhelmed with the quality of what replaces them.
• A typewriter on which people can write love letters. They can pin them to the wall or take them home. This is the sleeper surprise of the room--few people do it, but those who do get completely hooked. It's not unusual to find a teenager at the typewriter for an hour or a family learning how to use it together. 

There was a fourth interactive element in the Love Lounge in which people could recommend favorite love songs to get added to the soundtrack that plays in the space. We cut it in the first week after opening. It wasn't a substantive activity, we had no way to get back to people to tell them their song had been added, and it was right next to the typewriter--too many activities on one little desk.

Sound Stairs

As you walk up the stairs to the second floor of the exhibition, where the main gallery is, your footsteps trigger voices from the community saying "I love dance," "I love anthropology," "I love cats," etc. This installation is the only one that cost more than $30--about $2,000 for the parts. We see it as a long-term investment for the museum. We stole the idea from the Pittsburgh Children's Museum and worked with a fabulous local volunteer engineer to make it happen. We invite visitors to record themselves at the front desk with the staff member, and every month, we dump new voices into the staircase. We plan for this to be a permanent installation with content specific to the given exhibition at any time. This sound installation is delightful and adds surprise to the museum. I'm not sure whether people come back to hear their voices on it, but they certainly enjoy triggering them, listening, and recording themselves.

Second Floor and the Main Gallery

The main gallery for the exhibition primarily focuses on a blend of traditional exhibition content exploring romantic and platonic love. There is a mix of artwork, historical artifacts, community stories, and labels about the psychology of love. There are also four participatory experiences spread throughout the gallery:

The abacus and sticker setup for the Love Styles test.

• "After the Breakup, I..." wall. This is a simple post-it-based talkback wall where people share their breakup stories. Powerful, poignant, and entertaining. We used this technique to develop the prompt. Requires occasional culling for violent or overly sexual content, but mostly, it's PG-13 and on-topic.
• Love Styles personality test. This is our most elegant interactive in the exhibition, and it is always occupied by absorbed visitors. It is a personality test (based on real science) in which you can determine your own love style by answering a series of questions, teen magazine-style. We spent a long time prototyping this one. We didn't want people to have to add up points or do anything too onerous to participate. So, we created simple handmade abacuses that people use to track their responses to sets of questions. At the end of the quiz, you look at the beads to figure out what style is dominant. You then put a sticker under the name of your dominant style. The stickers accumulate to show a simple statistical distribution of love styles in the visitor community. Every once in a while, a post-it from the breakup interactive will make its way over here as a form of commentary on the activity. 
• Hearts to Hearts card game. This social game, based on the popular Apples to Apples, is a mixed bag. The idea is to select adjectives from a deck that best describe the feeling of common relationship experiences--Thanksgiving dinner, office holiday parties, sharing rooms with siblings. When you get a group together at the table, it's incredibly fun and successful at prompting people to share personal stories related to the topics at hand. But it's hard to explain to visitors who haven't played Apples to Apples, and if there is not a gallery host to facilitate, this one often sits unplayed.   



A DIY wedding!

• DIY Wedding Chapel. This one was not created by us. Artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle decided to create an immersive, surreal wedding chapel in which to show video clips from their series of weddings to the earth. They wanted to invite visitors to engage in spontaneous wedding ceremonies in the chapel, and so we brainstormed together until we decided on a blackboard with fill-in-the-blank wedding vows. (Rejected ideas included a paper towel dispenser for vows.) While very few people actually write and recite vows in the chapel, the ones that do are passionate and heartfelt, even when goofy. This is definitely a case where people's participation is higher given the overall participatory vibe of the gallery. In a traditional museum, I suspect people would see the blackboard as "part of the art" and not touch.

Elsewhere on the second floor, there are two small activities that explicitly tie the love show to our history collection:

• Love Map. In the history gallery, there is a map of Santa Cruz County with paper, pins, and red yarn for writing a memory about a love experience in the county and connecting it to the place where it happened. This was launched as a facilitated activity during a "Love Fest" event in April and stayed. It is a bit of an ugly stepchild interactive--since it wasn't planned with the rest of the exhibition, we tend to forget to maintain and regulate the content. It can get messy, but the layered effect is somewhat appealing despite the reduced coherence.
• Love matching game. Also created for the Love Fest, this little game is perched on a wall on the way from the second to the third floor. It is a simple poster showcasing photos from the museum archives of couples in love, old valentines, etc., along with cards with clues to match to the photos on the posterboard. We have found these staircase landing activities to be surprisingly appealing. Here are some girls crowded around it on their way through the museum. 

3rd Floor

The third floor of the museum takes love to a more spiritual and conceptual level. The sole gallery holds extraordinary paintings by Joan Brown, mostly reflecting her deep love of cats. Outside the gallery, there are personal stories from community members about connections to animals, and a lobby area that we have rebranded as a Creativity Lounge. There are three participatory activities on the third floor:

Cat temple meditation.

• Animal stories. At the end of a wall featuring five animal photos and related first-person stories, there is an entreaty for participation. If you have a pet story to add to the wall outside the gallery, you can email it to our curator of history/collections manager, Marla. Only two people have done this. People like looking at and reading the pet stories on display, but the idea of going home, finding a photo, writing something up, and sending it in? Not so much.
• Me collages. The Creativity Lounge is entirely taken over by this simple activity, in which visitors are invited to make collages that represent "the things you love most" from recycled magazines. There is a beautiful, simple set of clotheslines on which visitors can hang their completed collages. This activity is a bit of a conundrum. From an experience perspective, it's terrific. Visitors of all ages spend a long time working on their collages. They talk with each other while creating, both bonding and bridging as they cut and glue. There are many people who clearly have aha moments about the pleasure of simple art activities. And yet, while the collages look lovely on the wall, the content produced by them is weak. Almost no one looks at the finished collages except as a design element. We have a basket of completed ones (too many to hang!) with a sign that says, "Take home a hand-made collage." No one does. They pile up.
• Meditation cushions. This is a different kind of interaction. In the gallery with the Joan Brown paintings, there is a "cat temple" that Joan built and painted. It is strange and beautiful and we wanted people to have a different way to experience it. We put out some simple cushions on the floor--the kind you'd put on patio chairs--in a semi-circle around the temple. There's a simple label inviting you to sit and meditate on the work. I'm always surprised and delighted when I see people doing so, sitting quietly on red cushions, while just outside the gallery the scissors and magazine bits are flying at the collage activity. It's nice to remember that there really is room for all different kinds of participation in a museum.

So What?

What's the cumulative effect of all these participatory experiences? Do they really help people connect with the content at hand? And if their development means less room (mental or physical) for contemplation of artworks and historic artifacts, is it worth it?

Of course, I'm biased. I feel strongly that we need to provide multiple entry points to exhibitions. We need labels AND audio AND post-its AND collage-making AND games AND meditation. I am proud to see visitors increasing their dwell time, sharing their delight and enjoyment of the space, having meaningful conversations in the galleries, and generally expressing that the museum is becoming a useful place for them to explore topics near and dear to the heart (literally).

What's the downside? In this case, the tradeoff was in design. Because we were taking this "and" approach for the first time, we didn't quite have the skills to figure out how we should organize everything to be participatory AND look gorgeous. We realized we needed a more complex hierarchical design approach to incorporate all the new elements sensibly and attractively. The multi-disciplinary content and the inclusion of community voices were just as challenging from a design perspective as the participatory components. The whole process exposed our weaknesses in a good way. We know what we need learn about and improve on over time.

For now, I'm glad to hear visitor comments like this one, from a 16-year-old girl:

even though we have seen famous exhibits from picasso to monet-this is the first exhibit that makes me want to do art

Amen to that.

Weekend Reading: 2012 Trends and Young Adult Programs

Two great museumy reports to brighten your weekend:

• TrendsWatch 2012. The folks at the AAM Center for the Future of Museums have been experimenting with sharing ideas in several ways over the past couple of years--through their blog, their weekly newsletter, and a series of research reports. This TrendsWatch report, which I hope they intend to make an annual affair, is the most effective piece I think they've put out. It's tight, clear writing on seven big ideas on their radar: crowdsourcing, shifting non-profit tax status, pop up museums, online fundraising, creative aging, augmented reality, and education reform. Each article includes museum examples along with a broader look at the trend. The content is pretty US-specific (especially regarding tax status and education) but the blend of issues makes it more broadly relevant than other reports that focus solely on demographics or technology. Such a diverse group of topics in one report got my mind moving laterally and imagining other trends I might want to follow.
• Creativity, Community, and a Dash of the Unexpected: Adventures in Engaging Young Adult Audiences. I have a personal connection to this report, which was produced by the Denver Art Museum after a multi-year project developing meaningful connections with young adults. Three years ago today I was in Denver working with this terrific group of educators, technologists, and marketing folks to help them imagine new community-driven approaches to programming. It's amazing to see how far they've gone and how thoughtfully they've engaged in this work. While I'm clearly biased based on my involvement, I think this report is a bit deeper than some others I've been seeing lately that mostly focus on the branding/marketing side of working with younger audiences. It mostly focuses on program design, not marketing or evaluation, and some of the program design insights and framings are really valuable. I found myself frequently thinking: we should do that at our museum. The report starts with the statement: "We originally thought of this audience as an age group but later realized that style, not age, was a better way to categorize the target audience." Amen. Enjoy this quick read on rethinking engagement with new audiences.

Lead or Follow: Arts Administrators Hash it Out

Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking:

In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?

Sixteen arts administrators, journalists, and researchers weighed in on the question over a series of posts. Several decried the oversimplification of the question, arguing that it's not an issue of "lead vs. follow" but a spectrum of forms of participant engagement. A few trotted out familiar arguments for arts administrators as tastemakers (lead) or audience research as incontrovertible (follow). And some made fairly brilliant and impassioned cases for idiosyncratic perspectives. Here are three of my favorites... and a few more thoughts.

Roberto Bedoya: The "Yes And" Argument and its Civic Implications
Bedoya, the Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, makes a beautiful statement that arts administrators need to facilitate a multiplicity of leading voices, or as he puts it, "the courage of imagination and the plural." Particularly in an age of cultural and political division, Bedoya argues that leaders in the arts need to responsibly and boldly intermediate among many voices, using a combination of ethics and aesthetics to make policy and artistic decisions. If you care about how participatory art experiences can shape civic processes, read Bedoya's post.

Diane Ragsdale: You Can't Lead if No One is Paying Attention to You
Ragsdale, researcher and author of the terrific Jumper blog, suggests that most arts organizations are not "leading" communities but disregarding and demeaning them. Audience engagement happens strictly on institutional terms, for institutional purposes, and when audience members' views differ from the organization, their perspectives are not taken seriously. Ragsdale equates true following with listening, and acting on listening with leading. It's a good post that is representative of her powerful writing (mostly focused on the performing arts).

Trevor O'Donnell: Leaders Use Their Words 
O'Donnell was not one of the invited bloggers but a commenter from the field (a follower... or a good example of how silly the term "follower" is?). He made a comment on Michael Kaiser's fairly formulaic "great artists lead the nation" post, laying bare the banality of most of the language used to describe and present art experiences to the public. O'Donnell notes that great leaders don't sell their message with generic templates and exclamation points, but with "relevant, meaningful, motivational language that leverages the needs, wants and desires of their listeners." The way we talk about our work helps shape its importance to current and potential audiences.

This whole debate made me think about Adam Lerner, the Director and Chief Animator of the MCA Denver. Adam and I first met in 2008, when we were part of a National Academies think tank-ish thing on the future of museums and libraries. All the participants were asked to write one-page position papers about museums and libraries in the 21st century. Adam and I wrote papers that split dramatically on either side the lead/follow line. Adam argued for museums to become "less visitor-oriented," and I argued the opposite. He said museums were too spineless to project their own voices and so were misguidedly searching for direction from audiences. I said museums were too self-centered and needed to create community spaces with the growing army of people choosing cultural experiences outside of traditional arts institutions.

Turns out we're a lot more alike than I thought at the time. We both believe that institutions should have a strong identity and should boldly pursue and present it with audiences. The problem is three-fold:

• some of our institutional identities are not culturally or civically significant (see Bedoya)
• some of our institutions are too lily-livered to deliver a consistent, strong audience engagement strategy that reflects their unique significance (see Ragsdale)
• some of our institutions are too lazy to develop an authentic and powerful voice for their identity and program blend (see O'Donnell)

Adam concluded his position paper beautifully, writing:

The paradox is that developing a clear, authentic voice doesn’t isolate the institution but infinitely expands its relevance in the life of the city and citizen. It is so clear what the organic supermarket Whole Foods stands for, so they don’t need to worry about just selling food. They sell clothing, books, classes, skin care, yoga supplies, which all relate to the core of who they are. Museums have had difficulty becoming more integral to people’s life because they lost sight of their core, which should be different for each museum. A museum concerned with integrating art into the life of young people might find it appropriate to open a dance club. A museum that believes that it is most suited to be a temple of art can be a truly meditative oasis in the heart of a bustling city. A museum that is committed to childhood education might find it relevant to open a charter school. Museums in suburban locations need to determine how they can integrate themselves into the leisure patterns of their own constituency. Museums shouldn’t change by looking elsewhere; they should change by looking more carefully at themselves. That’s too difficult a task to pass off to visitors.

I'd add the caveat that for some institutions, it's too difficult a task to pass off to visitors. In an institution like mine, where the organizational identity is built on participation, the task can and must include them.

In the end, the issue is not who is leading or following, but the fact that we're dancing with our audiences in the same room, together. Not in separate rooms to separate songs.

What did you get out of the Lead or Follow experience? How do you respond to this question?

The Art of the Steal: Access & Controversy at the Barnes Foundation

Last week, I finally watched The Art of the Steal, an arresting documentary on the controversy around the evolution of the Barnes Foundation from a suburban educational art facility to a major urban art museum (to open in May 2012). The documentary raises basic questions about donor intent, legal execution of eccentric peoples' wills, and, most interesting to me, the definition of access to a collection.

A quick background on the Barnes Foundation. It was founded in 1922 by Albert Barnes, a wealthy scientist who collected what is now considered an incomparable collection of Impressionist and Modernist art. Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso--Barnes collected it before it was popular in the U.S., and he collected the best of the best. With the help of educational philosopher John Dewey, Barnes founded the Barnes Foundation as an educational facility in Merion, PA, near Philadelphia. Unlike most art collections, Barnes' art was neither exclusively private nor a public museum. It was primarily used as a teaching collection for youth and adult students. The Barnes Foundation allowed a limited number of public visitors two days a week, but visitors were second-class citizens compared to the students.

Barnes protected his vision for the collection in his will. The art could not be sold, reproduced, loaned, or traveled. The school was to continue. There were slight concessions to public visitation, leading to capped attendance of about 60,000 per year. However, over the past thirty years, Philadelphia leaders clamored for the art to move to the city and be made more accessible to visitors (projections suggest the new facility will welcome 250,000 per year). The film documents the incremental subversion of Barnes' will and the eventual development of a new, highly public home for the collection in Philadelphia--exactly what Barnes despised and sought to avoid.

The documentary is shrill at times, with several Barnes Foundation stalwarts ominously repeating the word "conspiracy." There are cringe-worthy art critics who decry Barnes' rivals as "people who know nothing about art." But the fundamental story is fascinating and really challenged some of my basic ideas about museums. Despite my focus on populism and access, I am sympathetic to Barnes and his followers, who feel strongly that a serious injustice has been done.

The civic and cultural leaders who successfully challenged the original intent of Barnes' will had two basic arguments for the transformation of the collection:

1. The Barnes Foundation was struggling financially. A move to a more accessible venue in the center of Philadelphia would increase attendance dramatically, thus bolstering finances.
2. The Barnes collection is an incredible cultural artifact that more people should be able to access. Demand exceeded availability for public hours in the Merion location, and that demand constituted a valid public concern, one that foundations and politicians felt necessary to address.

I think both these arguments are bullshit. Let's look at each one closely.

First, let's talk money. The strangest thing about the documentary was the insistence by all parties--those who supported the move to Philadelphia and those who wanted to preserve the Barnes in Merion--that increased attendance would solve institutional financial crises. I kept scratching my head and thinking, what kind of art museum makes big money on attendance? Most art museums get a maximum of 10% of their income from admissions.

Consider two examples in the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which welcomes about 800,000 visitors per year, had income of $80.4M in their 2010 fiscal year (based on their public 990 tax form). Of that, $3.9M (5%) came from museum attendance, and an additional $1.7M came from special exhibitions (2%).

Now, another institution--the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which welcomes 54,000 visitors annually and manages a school for community members as well as BFA and MFA students. Their total revenue in 2010 was $16.2M (their 990). Of that, $1M came from attendance (6%), and $9.3M (57%) came from the educational program.

What's healthier for the financial viability of the Barnes Foundation--focusing on being a school, or focusing on being a museum? I don't see how a four-fold increase in public attendance--saddled with the significant costs of operating a large urban museum--will ensure stability.


Second, let's talk about access. If a donor designates a particular use of his or her property, how closely does that have to be followed? If a large body of civic and cultural leaders feel that the designation is no longer culturally relevant, does that matter? If someone owns something unique (and bars its reproduction or transfer), how much "public good" does that collection have to confer before the owner's wishes are challenged? And on a more practical museum management level, are there multiple ways to validly define access to a collection?

I don't feel qualified to answer the first three questions. But I do feel confident in my answer to the last one: yes. There are many ways a collection can be accessible or inaccessible (check out the UCL report Collections for People for a rigorous review of this). There are some collections that are entirely private. Others are accessible seasonally to a handful of visitors. There are publicly-owned collections that are only accessible by appointment or through digitization efforts. There are objects you can see, and objects you can't.

The Barnes Foundation was inaccessible to visitors who wanted to come to the facility, pay an admission fee, and view the art in the galleries. At the same time, it was deeply accessible to a cadre of teachers, students, and artists who spent prolonged periods with the work.

The controversial reconfiguration of the Barnes Foundation suggests that the first kind of access is more important than the second. That attendance trumps depth of experience. That center city trumps suburb. That granting access to 60,000 people per year is not sufficient to appropriately meet the demand to view the collection. That that demand has a moral public value.

In museum circles, we often say, "numbers aren't everything." But when we say that, what other things do we offer up as alternatives? Can we make a compelling quantitative argument for the benefits conferred to students at the Barnes Foundation, many of whom engaged in multi-year art and horticulture programs? How many one-time 1-hour visits does a three-year course of study equal? Is it really "better" to have 250,000 visitors shuffle through a museum than to give a deep experience to a few hundred? Who gets to decide?

The Barnes Foundation was not founded as a museum. It was founded as a school that used a privately-held art collection as its curriculum. I don't see why museum standards of access should be applied to such an institution just because it would be politically convenient to do so.

And that, I think, leads to the real reason governors, mayors, and heads of Philadelphia-based charities pushed to move the Barnes Foundation to the city. The Barnes collection is an extraordinary cultural jewel, and Philadelphia wants that jewel in its crown. It doesn't really matter if the collection is accessed by 60,000 people or 250,000 people, whether those people have a deep experience or not, and whether their admissions tickets will improve the institution's financial health. What matters is that Philadelphia can tout the Barnes collection and its wonders in its tourism and marketing materials for the city.

In some ways, this is a good thing. It implies that civic leaders do understand the incredible value of cultural institutions as identity-builders and tourism-attractors. But I don't think that justifies such a blatant disregard for donor intent, trumpeted with a one-note, "more attendance = better" horn. What do you think?

Supporting Museum Tribes & Fans through Shared Ritual

Many people (Paul Orselli, Linda Norris, Pete Newcurator) in the museum field have written about the question of museum "tribes"--based partly on Seth Godin's book, partly on the longstanding fan culture that pervades our lives through sport, celebrity, and shared experience of mass events. The question is usually, "How can museums cultivate fandom among visitors?" or "What would a museum look like that embraced and supported tribal followings?"

I spent an (early) morning today with the local chapter of Kiwanis that got me thinking about this question again. I was struck by how ritualistic their meeting was--idiosyncratic nametags, a special song to welcome guests, a donation pool in which people offer "sad" or "happy" dollars to commemorate recent events in their lives, a raffle to choose who will create the trivia game for next week. There was a lot of camaraderie among the participants, but it was apparent that the structured ritual was just as important as the friendships to holding the group together.

So often when we talk about fans, we focus on shared affinity. People like the same sports team or band or craft activity, and therefore, form tribes based on that interest. But sometimes we forget how important ritual is to heightening that tribal sense and transforming individual collective fandom into something more communal. It's knowing the cheer as much as it is caring about the team. It's knowing when to stand up and when to clap. Fandom without shared ritual isn't tribalism--it's loneliness.

These tribal rituals, while often fan-driven, are hardly spontaneous. Professional cheerleaders of all kinds lead us through the motions, show us the way to fit in, and model the experience. And that makes me wonder if museum staff members should be starting rituals to help fans get involved.

I realize this may sound like social engineering, but in practice it's often quite charming and lowkey. At the Indianapolis Children's Museum, they have a "closing parade" every day to usher (potentially upset) children and families out the door. There are staff in plush costumes. They hand flags to little kids to wave. I even think there's a goodbye song. This ritual doesn't just leave families with a warm feeling about the museum--it encourages fans to share the experience with each other (as I'm doing with you right now).

Do you have institutional rituals that involve visitors or members?

A Simple Outcome of Visitor Participation: Delight

It's funny. I've spent years advocating for visitor participation for all kinds of reasons. Visitor contributions help participants feel connected to institutions. It can provide valuable information for the staff to do their jobs better. It helps institutions leverage the skills and creativity of their communities.

Now that I'm on staff at a museum, I've (re)discovered a more pedestrian value of visitor participation: it's delightful. Every day when I walk by our visitor comment board, I feel like I'm getting little gifts from visitors. The AT&T guy doesn't write poems for me. The budget doesn't produce abstract drawings or suggestions for how we can serve our community better.

I think on some level, we've always known that these handwritten notes, drawings, and missives are charming. Some institutions have even banked on that charm to create compelling ad campaigns featuring visitors' comments. As a researcher and activist for participation, I've sometimes downplayed the value of this charm because it seems like arsenal for professionals who claim participatory projects are frivolous. "Be charming and delightful" isn't one of the bottom-line goals of most museums.

But maybe it should be. For me, a professional who is pushing every day to make a struggling museum relevant and sustainable, I find incredible joy in these simple visitor comments. Scanning the comment board is one of the few activities in my workday when I'm confronted with unbridled creativity and optimism about the future of our institution. The comments provide me with some mental uplift, and they inspire me to keep pushing. And yes, they've served our organization in all kinds of tangible ways--introducing us to new interns, volunteers, and program ideas. But I have a new appreciation for the intangible now as well.

When we have to clear more room for new comments, I move the old ones to my office wall. My goal is to eventually be surrounded by the voices of our visitors--funny, sweet, demanding--so they can inspire me all day long. That may sound sappy, but these are tough times for people working in the arts. I figure we need all the delight we can get.

What Does it Mean to Have a Relationship with an Institution?

Recently, I've been doing a lot of workshops with cultural professionals around the question of developing authentic relationships between institutions and visitors. There's a fundamental strangeness to the concept of a relationship between a human and an organization. Most of our relationships, after all, are with people, and when we try to put an institutional face on relationship-type transactions, it can kill the intimacy or makes it feel creepy and commodified.

This expresses itself most powerfully in museums when we talk about building relationships with visitors over time. If I go on a date with you and we have fun, I develop some expectations about what will happen the next time I see you. I expect you'll remember some basic things about me--say, my name. But museums are one-night stand amnesiacs in the relationship department. A visitor comes once, has a great experience, starts "building the relationship," and then the next time she shows up, no one at the front desk knows anything about her.

This is terrible, both for the visitor and for the museum. And for most institutions there's no practical solution to the problem. Unless your organization is tiny, staff members can't have personal relationships with every user--nor, ethically, might they want to. And so, unless we give up entirely or settle for the amnesiatic status quo, we have to find another way.

How do we appropriately extrapolate from what works in interpersonal relationships to develop relationships between organizations and users that are authentic, meaningful, and positive?

In looking at successful examples from institutions around the world, I've come to feel there are three important elements that can support healthy, inspiring relationships between organizations and users. I'm curious to hear what you think works and doesn't as well and I hope you'll share your experiences in the comments.

Make room for personal expression and ownership--both by staff and audience members.

So often, organizations present people--staff, donors, board members--in the most formal ways possible, via long lists of printed names or stilted photographs. These lists do not convey the passion that these people feel for the organization. They model impersonal, businesslike relationships between the institution and the people who care about it the most. In contrast, organizations that feature staff or member walls celebrating people's diverse talents and interests reflect the idea that this is a community of people who care about each other.

This kind of personal expression comes out in exhibitions via signed or handwritten labels, staff picks, and visitor-contributed objects and stories. It comes out in creative donor walls and staff directories online. I always love it when I see a staff show at a museum or a wall at a design firm celebrating the kids who have come in to serve as focus group members (see photo). These kinds of indicators help me understand that I can be part of a community by getting involved.

Wherever possible, use institutional resources to encourage relationships among members and users rather than just with the institution.

A friend sent me this photo of an exhibit at SFMOMA, saying he had encountered this interactive on a first date and that it sparked a lot of discussion and personal sharing between him and his date. He commented that the fact that there were two stools at the station turned something that could have been solely individual into a social opportunity.

How often do we remember to put out that second stool? We know from copious audience research that the social experience is one of the most cited reasons that people visit and enjoy museums. There are so many ways that institutions can enhance this social experience, both for intact groups and for people who are interested in engaging with strangers. And these relationships--among people---are more natural to sustain than relationships with institutions or staff members. The challenge is initiating them. In most cases, docents and floor staff are trained to be the point person for conversation and idea-sharing. This creates a dependency where visitors only experience the communal relationship if it is facilitated by staff. We have to retrain ourselves and our staff not to be the center of the relationship but instead to be the hosts who match make among visitors, who can then pursue more sustainable relationships on their own. I've written a lot about this elsewhere with regard to social objects, but for the sake of this post, I'm thinking about how we create explicit ways (or not) for participants to get to know each other in the course of a museum visit. Sometimes an extra seat can make the difference between solo and social.

Support and enhance relationships through consistent multi-platform engagement.

In our personal lives, we use lots of tools to stay in touch and further relationships with each other. We hang out. We call. We write. Museums and non-profits use all these tools as well, but they often employ different staff (with different personalities and relationship styles) to manage each platform. I may have a conversation with a floor educator at a museum and then receive an e-newsletter from the same institution with a different tone and focus.

This may make sense from a workflow perspective, but it's unnatural from a relationship-building perspective. Instead of feeling like each communication medium enhances and deepens my relationship with an organization, I feel like I'm getting lots of discontinuous blips from a fragmented institution. This is most extreme in institutions that have a delightful, idiosyncratic style to their content communication and a more formal approach to development communication. I'm less likely to become a member or donate if that experience isn't naturally and obviously part of the relationship I'm building with the institution on the content side. Making this change means shifting from thinking about content experiences over here and communication strategy over there and instead focusing on community engagement as a coherent, unified experience.

Beck Tench has been doing some interesting work in this direction at the Museum of Life and Science. For example, winners of the Museum's "name that zoom" Twitter game now receive a personalized thank you in the (snail) mail from Beck, along with tickets to the museum and a silly prize related to the nature of the game. The idea of sending winners a reward is nothing new, but in this case, the reward shares the same sensibility as the game, thus more effectively deepening the relationship.

What do you think works or falls flat when it comes to building authentic relationships between organizations and individuals?