A Long Interview as I say Goodbye to the MAH (and Thoughts on the Privilege of Leading Change)

Some of our courageous team. We are strong together.

I'm in my final week at the MAH. It's everything I hoped and feared: sweet, exciting, sad, poignant, and full of delicious treats and surprises from my loving, zany colleagues.

Geoffrey Dunn, a fabulous writer and collaborator, just published a big cover interview with me in our local weekly, the Good Times. We talked Abbott Square, community issue exhibitions, surfing, and the beauty and struggle of community-driven change. If you're curious to hear more about what I'm most proud of in my eight years at the MAH, I hope you'll check it out.

I was proud to work with amazing colleagues to lead major change at the museum. We made it a more inclusive, relevant, and successful place. It was not easy. But it was needed. And it was worth it.

My favorite question Geoffrey asked me was about engaging with people who were critical of the transformation of the MAH. Here's his question and my full answer (which was edited down for length in the published article).

Geoffrey wrote: 
Some of the changes you imposed on the museum, including Abbott Square, generated criticism, mostly from some of the old guard types who wanted more traditional explorations of art and history.

Here's my full response:
Not everyone liked how we, and I, led the MAH. But as a leader, I have to weigh those small number of critical voices against the hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic people who got newly involved - including many who had never felt welcome in a museum before. For every critic, there were literally a thousand new people telling us how grateful they were for the changes.

In a lot of ways, I’m embarrassed I spent as much emotional energy on those critics as I did. I had to remind myself that every minute I spent worrying about someone who didn’t like what we were doing - someone who was never going to like what we were doing! - was a minute I wasn’t spending on someone who could and would benefit from being involved. Over time, I learned to bless and release those critics, so I could focus on the people who were ready to engage.

When I think of the loudest critics of our work, I think of people who wanted the MAH to be a more exclusive, elitist, academic place. I think that’s the wrong vision for a public institution. I think it’s the wrong vision for Santa Cruz. For a museum to survive and thrive today, it must be relevant and meaningful for many people from many backgrounds. It must sway to the pulse of the cultural community in which it resides. It must be radically inclusive, constantly working to invite new people to connect for new reasons. That’s what we tried to do at the MAH.

And these changes were not just my doing. The board hired me with the specific mandate to make the MAH “a thriving, central gathering place.” I hired community organizers and creative convenors. We made it our mission to open the museum up. To younger people. To Latinx people. To people who were unsure if their story, their art, their voice mattered in our community. We made the MAH a museum of “and” - art AND history, participation AND contemplation, loud Friday nights and quiet Tuesday afternoons. The friction, the hybridity, different people from different walks of life colliding through art and history and public life - that’s what building a more connected community is all about.

People often are afraid to lead change because they know that some will resist that change. That’s true. But it’s also true that if you are changing an organization to be more inclusive and relevant, many, many people will fall in love with the change. They will thank you for the change. They will push you to keep changing. I don’t see leading change as hard or painful. I see it as a great privilege and I feel lucky to do it.

***

To all the inclusive changemakers out there: I honor your courage. I honor your struggle. It's worth it. 

Quick Hit: Art of Relevance Video, Podcast, and a Google Hangout this week

I've been traveling a lot recently, exploring the ideas behind The Art of Relevance with colleagues around the US. Here are two artifacts of my travels... and an opportunity to join in on a virtual/real life meetup this Wednesday.

VIDEO - THE ART OF RELEVANCE

Want to join the conversation about The Art of Relevance but can't make it to a book event? The Minnesota Historical Society made a video of my recent talk there. The video is well-produced, including subtitles and the Q&A. I talk for the first 30 minutes, and then we're doing Q&A in the second half. Check it out.

AUDIO - PRATFALLS PODCAST

Immediately after leaving the Minnesota Historical Society, I sat down with Levi Weinhagen as a guest on his Pratfalls podcast. Levi is an excellent interviewer, and he got me talking about lots of things I don't usually talk about: living off the grid, finding my path, learning from my parents, being a mom and museum director, dreaming of being a ninja warrior. It's an hour interview, and if you enjoy it, I strongly recommend checking out Levi's other episodes interviewing creative people about how they approach their work.

HANGOUT - MUSEUMHIVE

This Wednesday, I'm participating in an experimental Museumhive event. It combines a real life meetup (in Boston) with a virtual Google hangout. I'll be joining in via hangout to talk about distributed museums with Brad Larson, Ed Rodley, Paul Orselli, and lots of Boston area colleagues. You can participate virtually, or if you are in the Boston area, register (for free) to be there in person.

Enjoy the media, get connected, go outside!

ASKing about Art at the Brooklyn Museum: Interview with Shelley Bernstein and Sara Devine

I’ve always been inspired by the creative ways the Brooklyn Museum uses technology to connect visitors to museum content. Now, the Brooklyn Museum is doing a major overhaul of their visitor experience--from lobby to galleries to mobile apps--in an effort to “create a dynamic and responsive museum that fosters dialogue and sparks conversation between staff and all Museum visitors.” This project is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies as part of their Bloomberg Connects program.

I’ve been particularly interested in ASK, the mobile app component of the project. The Brooklyn team has been blogging about their progress (honestly! frequently!). To learn more, I interviewed Brooklyn Museum project partners Shelley Bernstein, Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology, and Sara Devine, Manager of Audience Engagement & Interpretive Materials.

What is ASK, and why are you creating it?

ASK is a mobile app which allows our visitors to ask questions about the works they see on view and get answers—from our staff—during their visit.  

ASK is part of an overall effort to rethink the museum visitor experience. We began with a series of internal meetings to evaluate our current visitor experience and set a goal for the project. We spent a year pilot-testing directly with visitors to develop the ASK project concept. The pilots showed us visitors were looking for a personal connection with our staff, wanted to talk about the art on view, and wanted that dialogue to be dynamic and speak to their needs directly. We started to look to technology to solve the equation. In pilot testing, we found that enabling visitors to ASK via mobile provided the personal connection they were looking for while responding to their individual interests.

Are there specific outcome goals you have for ASK? What does success look like?

We have three goals.

Goal 1: Personal connection to the institution and works on view. Our visitors were telling us they wanted personal connection and they wanted to talk about art. We need to ensure that the app is just a conduit to helps allow that connection to take place.  

Working with our team leads and our ASK team is really critical in this—we’ve seen that visitors want dialogue to feel natural. For example, staff responses like: “Actually, I’m not really sure, but we do know this about the object” or encouraging people with “That’s a great question” has helped make the app feel human.

Goal 2: Looking closer at works of art. We’d like to see visitors getting the information they need while looking more closely at works of art. At the end of the day, we want the experience encouraging visitors to look at art and we want screens put to the side. We were heartened when early testers told us they felt like they were looking more closely at works of art in order to figure out what questions to ask. They put down the device often, and they would circle back to a work to look again after getting an answer—all things we verified in watching their behavior, too.

Moving forward, we need to ensure that the team of art historians and educators giving answers is encouraging visitors to look more closely, directing them to nearby objects to make connections, and, generally, taking what starts with a simple question into a deeper dialogue about what a person is seeing and what more they can experience.  

Goal 3: Institutional change driven by visitor data. We have the opportunity to learn what works of art people are asking about, what kinds of questions they are asking, and observations they are making in a more comprehensive way than ever before. This information will allow us to have more informed conversations about how our analog interpretation (gallery labels for example) are working and make changes based on that data.

So, success looks like a lot of things, but it’s not going to be a download rate as a primary measure. We will be looking at how many conversations are taking place, the depth of those conversations, and how much conversational data is informing change of analog forms of interpretation.  

You’ve done other dialogic tech-enabled projects with visitors in the past. Time delay is often a huge problem in the promise of interaction with these projects. Send in your question, and it can be days before the artist or curator responds with an answer. ASK is much more real-time. As you think about ASK relative to other dialogic projects, is timeliness the key difference, or is it something else entirely?

How much “real time” actually matters is a big question for us. Our hunch is it may be more about how responsive we are overall. Responsive means many things—time, quality of interaction, personal attention. It’s that overall picture that’s the most important. That said, we’ve got a lot of testing coming up to take our ASK kiosks—the ipads you can use to ask questions if you don’t have or don’t want to use your iPhone—and adjust them to be more a part of the real time system.  Also, now that the app is on the floor we’re testing expectations that surround response time and how to technically implement solutions to help. There’s a lot to keep testing here and we are just at the very beginning of figuring this out.

That’s really interesting. If the conversations are about specific works of art, I would assume visitors would practically demand a real-time response. But you think that might not be true?

In testing, visitors were seen making a circle pattern in the galleries. They would ask a question, wander around, get an answer and then circle back to the work of art. Another recent tester mentioned that the conversation about something specific actually ended in a different gallery as he walked, but that he didn’t mind it. In another testing session, a user was not so happy she had crossed the gallery and then was asked to take a picture because the ASK team member couldn’t identify the object by the question; she didn’t want to go back. This may be one of those things people feel differently about, so we’ll need to see how it goes.

If we are asking someone to look closer at a detail (or take a photograph to send us), we’ll want to do that quickly before they move on, so there’s a learning curve in the conversational aspect that we need to keep testing. For instance, we can help shape expectations by encouraging people to wander while we provide them with an answer and that the notifications feature will let them know when we’ve responded.

Many museums have tried arming staff with cheerful “Ask me!” buttons, to little effect. The most common question visitors ask museum staff is often “Where is the bathroom?” How does ASK encourage visitors to ask questions about content?

Actually, so far we’ve had limited directional, housekeeping type questions. People have mostly been asking about content. Encouraging them to do more than ask questions is the bigger challenge.

We spent a LOT of time trying to figure out what to call this mobile app. This is directly tied into the onboarding process for the app—the start screen in particular. We know from user testing that an explanation of the app function on the start screen doesn’t work. People don’t read it; they want to dive right into using the app, skimming over any text to the “get started” button. So how to do you convey the functionality of the app more intuitively? Boiling the experience down to a single, straight forward call-to-action in the app’s name seemed like a good bet.

We used “ask” initially because it fit the bill, even though we knew by using it that we were risking an invitation for questions unrelated to content—”ask” about bathrooms, directions, restaurants near by—particularly when we put the word all over the place, on buttons, hats, signs, writ large in our lobby.

Although “ask” is a specific kind of invitation, we’re finding that the first prompt displayed on screen once users hit “get started” is really doing the heavy lifting in terms of shaping the experience. It’s from this initial exchange that the conversation can grow. Our initial prompt has been: “What work of art are you looking at right now?” This prompt gets people looking at art immediately, which helps keep the focus on content. We’re in the middle of testing this, but we’re finding that a specific call-to-action like this is compelling, gets people using the app quickly and easily, and keeps the focus on art.

Some of the questions visitors have about art are easily answered by a quick google search. Other questions are much bigger or more complex. What kinds of questions are testers asking with ASK?

It’s so funny you say that because we often talk about the ASK experience specifically in terms of not being a human version of Google. So it’s actually not only about the questions we are asked, but the ways we respond that open dialogue and get people looking more closely at the art. That being said, we get all kinds of questions—details in the works, about the artist, why the work is in the Museum, etc. It really runs the gamut. One of the things we’ve noticed lately is people asking about things not in the collection at all—like the chandelier that hangs in our Beaux-Arts Court or the painted ceiling (a design element) in our Egypt Reborn gallery.

Visitors’ questions in ASK are answered by a team of interpretative experts. Do single visitors build a relationship with a given expert over their visit, or are different questions answered by different people? Does it seem to matter to the visitors or to the experience?

The questions come into a general queue that’s displayed on a dashboard that the ASK team uses. Any of the members of the team can answer, pass questions to each other, etc. Early testers told us it didn’t matter to them who was answering the questions, only the quality of the answer. Some could tell that the tone would change from person to person, but it didn’t bother them.

We just implemented a feature that indicates when a team member is responding. Similar to the three dots you see in iMessage when someone on the other end is typing, but our implementation is similar to what happens in gchat and the app displays “[team member first name] is typing.” In implementing the feature this way, we want to continually bring home the fact that the visitor is exchanging messages with a real person on the other end (not an automated system). Now that we’ve introduced names, it may change expectations that visitors have about hearing from the same person or, possibly, wanting to know more about who is answering. This will be part of our next set of testing.

The back-of-house changes required to make ASK possible are huge: new staff, new workflows, new ways of relating to visitors. What has most surprised you through this process?

This process has been a learning experience at every point... and not just for us. As you note, we’re asking a lot of our colleagues too. The most aggressive change is more about process than product. We adopted an agile planning approach, which calls for rapid-fire pilot projects. This planning process is a completely new way of doing business and we have really up-ended workflows, pushing things through at a pace that’s unheard of here (and likely many other museums). One of the biggest surprises has been not only how much folks are willing to go-with-the-flow, but how this project has helped shape what is considered possible.

In our initial planning stages, we would go into meetings to explain the nature of agile and how this would unfold and I think many of our colleagues didn’t believe us. We were talking about planning and executing a pilot project in a six-week time span—absolutely unreal.

The first one or two were a little tough, not because folks weren’t willing to try, but because we were fighting against existing workflows and timelines that moved at a comparatively glacial pace. The more pilots we ran and the more times we stepped outside the existing system (with the help of colleagues), the easier it became. At some point, I think there was a shift from “oh, Shelley and Sara are at it again” to “gee, this is really possible in this timeframe.”

After two years of running rapid pilots and continuing to push our colleagues (we’re surprised they’re still speaking to us sometimes!), we’ve noticed other staff members questioning why projects take as long as they do and if there’s a better way to plan and execute things. That’s not to say that they weren’t already having these thoughts, but ASK is something that can be pointed to as an example of executing project—on a large scale and over time—in a more nimble way. That’s an unexpected and awesome legacy.

Thanks so much to Shelley and Sara for sharing their thoughts on ASK. What do you want to ask them? They will be reading and responding to comments here, and if you are excited by this project, please check out their blog for a lot more specifics. If you are reading this by email and would like to post a comment, please join the conversation here.

Developing a Theory of Change, Part 1: A Logical Process

This is the first in a two-part series about the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History’s new theory of change. This week, Ian David Moss and I are each writing blog posts about our collaborative process to develop a theory of change at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Check out his blog post on the Fractured Atlas site. Next week, I’ll share more about what is in our theory of change, and why.

For three years, we hit the gas at my museum—hard. We were pointed in a new direction and knew we had to push ourselves to expand our community impact.

Three years in, the dust settled on the many changes. We had tripled our attendance. Doubled our staff. Experimented, launched, and retired many programs and exhibition formats.

We decided it was time to shift from exploring to deepening. A little over a year ago, we received a three-year grant from the James Irvine Foundation to strengthen our commitment to community engagement. One of the first things we decided we had to do was to grow some roots under the new strategies at the museum. We embarked on a process of “naming and claiming” the work we do.

Where to start? We decided to develop three things:

• Clear engagement goals that define how we do our work
• A theory of change to connect what we do to the impact we seek
• An engagement handbook to provide an overview of our goals, our theory of change, and the programs where they are manifest

I’ve written about the engagement goals before. I’ll write about the handbook soon. This blog post focuses on the theory of change and the process by which we developed it.

A theory of change is a model that connects: the activities we do, to the outcomes they effect, to the impact we seek to create in the world.

We wanted to build a theory of change for two reasons:

1. Externally, we need strong, data-driven arguments for support. We can’t just say,” fund this exhibition and the community will grow stronger.” We have to prove it. Donors want to understand the logic of how their dollars will translate into impact. A strong theory of change can make that case. 
2. Internally, everyone needs to know what “good” looks like and how their work helps contribute to the overall goals of the organization. A clear theory of change helps staff make strategic choices at every level.

We didn’t know how to develop a theory of change. But we knew we wanted to be rigorous about it. So we contracted with Ian David Moss, of Fractured Atlas and Createquity fame, to shepherd us through the process. Besides being brilliant and skilled in this area, Ian came in with an outsider’s perspective, which really helped us get out of the mindset of what we THINK we do and shift into what is actually observable and track-able.

Here’s what we did:

• Ian came to Santa Cruz, interviewed a bunch of staff, and drafted a very rough theory of change based on what he learned about our programming.
• We did a board/staff retreat where we built theories of change in two directions: UP from our activities to our intended impact, and DOWN from the intended impact to the activities that fuel it. The “DOWN” side was the most interesting, because it helped us understand the role we could play in our desired impact—and the community partners we would need to engage and support to see the impact realized to its fullest.
• We worked with Ian to revise the theory based on the retreat.
• Ian did a social psychology literature review to understand the research grounding the connections we made from activities to outcomes to impacts. We identified areas where the connections were weak and where we have to do more research to ensure that the logic is sound.
• We developed a final version of the theory in a wonky powerpoint flowchart model.
• We worked with a fabulous illustrator (Crista Alejandre) to transform the flowchart into an inspiring graphic.
• We started using the theory of change to focus our programs and partnerships, evaluate our work, and change the way we talk about what we do.

Here are some questions for Ian about his side of the experience working with us on this project. Next week, I’ll write about the actual content of the theory of change and how it is starting to impact our organization.

When you are working with an organization on a theory of change, how do you sort out the organizations' aspirations from the reality of their current activities?

Ian: This is always one of the most challenging (and interesting) parts of the engagement. One of the reasons why I find theories of change valuable as a tool for this kind of conversation is that they are really good at making the chain of logic – or lack thereof – between an organization’s activities and goals really clear. That sets up a process where I map out what I perceive the connections to be, and then I run it by the organization to make sure that I’m understanding their thinking correctly. If I spot a place in the logic chain that doesn’t make sense to me, all I need to do is ask some probing questions about it. It could well be that I’ve overlooked something important, in which case I’ll add in whatever’s missing, or it could be that I’ve uncovered something the organization hasn’t thought of, which could spark a much-needed reassessment of what the strategy is or even what the real goal is. (This is exactly what happened to us at Createquity: our theory of change precipitated a global rethinking of our entire content and engagement strategy because we discovered a gap between what we were doing and what our aspirations were.) Either way, the theory of change makes the assumptions embedded in a strategy transparent to everyone and provides a way to put those assumptions to the test.

In our work together, we ended up looking primarily to social psychology research to develop a strong logical basis for the MAH’s theory of change. Do you often find that these projects take you outside of the “arts” field in terms of defining the logic that connects activities to outcomes to impacts?

It depends. I would definitely say that you guys are unusual in how you see non-arts and non-humanities research and practices as not just relevant but central to your work at the museum. But I’d venture to say that it’s a rare arts organization that can’t learn something from how things are done in the wider world, whether that means understanding how and why potential audience members are motivated to make the choices they do, or understanding the policy context for the community-level changes you’re hoping to see, or whatever. I think a very common mistake people make is to draw the frame too narrowly, to say “well, we don’t have any data on this exact thing that we’re looking for, so there’s no point in trying to answer that question.” The reality is that we have many tools to understand and to estimate the way the world works around us, and there are a lot of parallels and inferences to be drawn either from examples in analogous fields or from initiatives that have a general focus that includes the arts but isn’t specific to them.

What do you think is the most challenging part of developing a theory of change?

Different projects present different challenges, but one thing I’ve found to be consistent is that the theory of change process can end up drawing out major differences in thinking styles. There’s a certain type of person who’s really comfortable breaking ideas down into orderly, modular components and analyzing the connections between them. Then there are other folks who are not at all accustomed to thinking that way – they’re much more at home in an open-ended, anything-goes brainstorming session that encourages divergent thinking and untethered creativity. For those people, the process of creating a theory of change or logic model can very easily feel confining if you don’t set it up carefully. What I’ve found is that things go better if I make sure that nobody has unrealistic expectations placed upon them. A lot of people find it easier to have a conversation and then react to a model presented to them than be tasked with having to figure everything out themselves. On the other hand, other folks want to be super involved and that’s great too.

Any words of wisdom about how to build buy-in and encourage use once a theory of change is developed?

A really good way to do this is to include it in training materials for both current and new staff. The more that the theory of change gets talked about, the more likely it is to be used. You can also use it as a reference point for other institutional capacity-building things your organization is doing. So the MAH used it as the basis for a measurement framework for the organization. At Fractured Atlas, it was a key input for a new brand book we developed to guide our internal and external communications. It can be an attachment to grant applications or included in annual reports to donors. And it’s important that the theory of change be periodically revisited to make sure that it doesn’t reflect stale thinking. That all being said, I would emphasize that going into the process with the intention for a theory of change to be useful is the number one predictor of whether it will actually be useful. Furthermore, the best way to build buy-in for a theory of change is by giving people a voice in creating it. That’s why as much as possible I try to involve front-line staff as well as leadership in the process, so that it will feel resonant at all levels of the organization.

Thanks to Ian for collaborating on this process with us. If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment or question, you can join the conversation here.

Community Science Workshops and Shared Authorship of Space: Interview with Emilyn Green

Imagine the most community-based science center possible. Imagine it in a poor, immigrant farmworker community. It exists. It thrives. In California. In a Community Science Workshop.

A couple months ago, I visited a Community Science Workshop for the first time in Watsonville, CA. I was awestruck. A small room, packed with gadgets, packed with fossils, packed with tools, packed with PEOPLE everywhere making and exploring and building and learning. The people were of all ages--moms with babies strapped to their fronts, six year-olds using skillsaws, pre-teens building robots, teenagers doing homework. There was a spirit of conviviality and purpose and helpfulness and Spanglish in the air. The design and feel of the place was different than any science center I'd ever experienced. I knew I could learn a lot from it.

I sat down with Emilyn Green, Executive Director of the Community Science Workshop Network, to learn more about their history, design, and engagement strategy.

Can you give me the overview of Community Science Workshops? What are they and where did they come from? 

A Community Science Workshop is a place for kids to tinker, make, and explore their world through science. The first one was started in 1991 by a San Francisco educator, Dan Sudran, in his garage. The Exploratorium is great, but it wasn't super-accessible. Dan was living in the Mission neighborhood, which at the time was very kid-dense, mostly first-generation immigrants, and Dan noticed that when he was messing around in his garage with physics gadgets, he could not keep the kids in his neighborhood out of his garage. They were so fascinated and wanted to be there every day.
There are lots of great science museum resources, but not where these kids can walk after school. In most cases, they're not places where kids can go by themselves at all.

So the Community Science Workshop model is to put a drop-in, FREE community science center in a place that is walkable to kids' lives and schools. In a place where kids are already walking around after school.

The core program is a permanent, dedicated physical space, full of interactive hands-on physical exhibits, as well as a tinkering and making space, and recycled materials. Most Workshops also run a wide range of additional programs - supplemental school day programs, afterschool programs, mobile units that go to housing projects. There are a whole bunch of programs to disseminate the science but the central workshop space is the heart of it.

Where do Community Science Workshops fit in the informal science landscape?

It's kind of tricky. We don't fit the more common templates. The best explanation is "community science center." But in the more traditional lexicon, these might be defined as "informal spaces."

Now that there is a new emphasis on "ecosystems of STEM learning" - for us, that's really helpful. Our programs end up being the hub of the local science learning ecosystem--especially in communities where there isn't a science center for miles in any direction.

How are Workshop locations selected?

The first one was in the Mission. We received two rounds of NSF funding in the 1990s to expand. We've focused on farmworker communities--there are so many kids in these communities throughout California. At that time, we expanded to Watsonville, where strawberries come from. And Fresno in the Central Valley--a city of 500,000, hundreds of miles from the closest science center. And a couple other sites that didn't make it financially (more on that later).

I came on in 2010 to start the statewide nonprofit network. At that point, we opened three new locations: Sanger, Greenfield, and a new San Francisco workshop in the Excelsior neighborhood because the Mission has changed so dramatically. The Mission location is still a useful hub for San Francisco school programs. Excelsior is now the walkable neighborhood space.

What happened to the ones that folded?

We received NSF funding for three years and then it cut off. In places that succeeded, at that point, a local coalition was in place to fund the Workshop. Where it didn't work, no local support stepped up. That taught us a lot. Now, when people are interested in starting one, we emphasize permanence. It takes a local coalition of people who are really committed to this to have a program that lasts.

Who are those local coalitions?

We're really different from traditional science centers in our funding model. We don't have paying members. We're not going to do that. It's not a Community Science Workshop if it's not free to participants. In fact, we have almost no individual donors. We have a few shining, beloved exceptions, but that's not a significant part of our model at this time.

So we tend to have three legs of support: municipal, grants/donations, and fee for service (usually with the school district). The municipal support can be actual funding - from Parks and Rec, or Environmental Education/Public Works in Watsonville - or a free building, or free access to a van, or materials... or free access to the dump to get materials. Several Community Science Workshops also get Measure S grants - gang prevention grants - through their cities. Grants come from community foundations, small local family foundations, local businesses. And then the fee for service is mostly school districts that contract with the Workshop for science enrichment/science instruction.

What unique design elements make Community Science Workshops work?

Geography is key. We tend to overemphasize it, because it's the initial requirement for any kind of success in these communities. Kids in these neighborhoods are wandering around alone after school. So if kids can walk to us, they can participate.

Once in the space, there are a bunch of design features that continue to be about access. Our fundamental premise is that kids are really interested in stuff. Given a wide variety of stuff, they will find something that they are excited about and will take on projects. We assume the motivation is there. The interest is there. So if a kid is not engaging, it's likely some barrier to access.

One thing you'll notice when you walk in is a ton of user-generated content. Most is hand-made, by participants or staff or parents, and that is everything from our signage to our exhibits.

We tend to be fully bilingual where appropriate. Our staff is almost always Spanish/English bilingual. And we hire from the community. Over 30% of our staff statewide are either former Workshop students or parent volunteers. That's an important design principle for the space - who the kids see when they enter the space.

We have some considerations about height and accessibility. We make sure that kids can grab materials and tools without staff intervention. Part of this is practical: you can't facilitate making and tinkering for 30 kids if you have to hand them everything they need. And it shows kids that they can be the agents of their own learning.

And then there's the most important design element - it's MESSY. We've been playing around with different ways to describe this and not terrify people. It's not messy like “vermin-infested”. It looks like a space that is used by humans every day. It's "purposfully messy." It's organized enough so people coming in can learn the layout, but it's the opposite of sterile. Surfaces are dense, and covered, and richly layered, and there is nothing in the room that implies "don't touch me or you'll get in trouble." That bar is pretty low for kids - they really need to know they are welcome to explore.

I loved the feeling of the space. It made me think of the Spanish word "ambiente"--that convivial, welcoming feeling. It also made me think about some of what we learned in a recent ethnographic study in which some Latino moms talked about "American events being so organized, whereas Latin events have joyful chaos." I know that most of your design focus is on kids. Do you think there is also a cultural/ethnic aspect to the kind of access and design you use? 

I feel very careful talking about the ways that the particular populations who we choose to work with for social justice reasons are also the people who make our work possible because of cultural expectations. For example, kids and tools. It's much easier for us to work with kids with power tools in these Workshops than it might be with other families because a lot of these parents use tools in their own lives. They are comfortable with them.

I was amazed by how community-based and authentic it feels. Many science centers struggling to engage "underserved" people with informal science. You are succeeding. What do you think is the difference? 

I come back to geography. Easy access to the space. When I talk with people in science centers, some really dedicated people working on these questions, they acknowledge that geography is a big hurdle they have to get over.

But there also is a sense of community ownership. For example, the Exploratorium is an extraordinarily participatory museum, but it's not nearly as participatory as a Community Science Workshop. Any big museum has barriers and limitations to full community ownership. Anyone walking into a CSW could repair a broken exhibit--anytime.

And that's the way we respect the contributions of the families we are working with. They are authors in the space.

To make a sweeping generalization, it seems that the folks we work with--working class people, people who work with their hands for a living, people with larger extended families - are very comfortable with spaces where multiple people are authors. They are comfortable with shared authorship of space and events. Whereas formal organizations have a harder time facilitating a shared sense of space and events.

Really interesting. So there is authorship, but no bylines.

 No visible bylines. But they still exist informally. The bylines are in the community’s awareness of the space. "Aurora made that sign." "I helped paint that sign." "I was here when Sal was working on that." People know, but they know based on their real experience of it in the space.

When I visited, it was so clear that there are so many people who use the Workshop again and again, who build things over time, who get involved in different projects for different reasons. 

Yes. And it's hard for us to document. Half of our attendance per year is in enrollment and school-based programs, but half is in our drop-in spaces, where we don't track participants at all. We know anecdotally that a lot of these people are repeating and deepening their participation, but we don't have the data.

We're just starting to interview our alumni now and creating a catalogue of their stories. It's powerful. But that's not the focus of the program. The focus of the program is to make it work every day.


Big thanks to Emilyn Green and the Community Science Workshop Network for sharing insights in this post. Emilyn will be checking in on the comments here and can respond to your questions.  If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment, you can join the conversation here.

Museum 2.0 Rerun: Inside the Design of an Amazing Museum Project to Capture People's Stories

Recently, we've been talking at our museum about techniques for capturing compelling audio/video content with visitors. It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they learned some unexpected lessons along the way. Lots of inspiring and practical tips below - enjoy!



How and why did Object Stories come to be?

The project arose from a grant announcement from MetLife Foundation around community engagement and outreach. I knew I didn’t want to do something temporary—a program that would last a year or two and then go away.

In the education department, we have some key values around slowing down, conversation and participation around art, and deep looking. And so this concept of asking visitors to spend some focused time thinking about their relationships with objects and artworks really made sense to me.

Also, on a personal level, I had this really powerful experience with my mother in a Storycorps booth in Grand Central years ago that had a profound impact on me. She had revealed things I’d never known, and I kept coming back to it.

What did you end up with and how did you get there?

Our first notion was all about something mobile, something that would go out to the community. We imagined an cart at the farmer’s markets where people could record stories. But we couldn’t figure out how we were going to sustain that with our staff.

We ended up with a gallery in the museum instead. It’s in a good location, but it’s also kind of a pass-through space to other galleries. It has a recording booth that you sign up in advance to use, and you go in and tell a story about an object that is meaningful to you. The other parts of the gallery are for experiencing the stories, and for connecting with the Museum collection. We have cases with museum objects that people told stories about, with large images of those storytellers adjacent to the object, and in the middle of the gallery is a long rectangular table with touchscreens where people can access all the stories that have been recorded.

Your recording booth asks participants for audio stories plus photos of themselves with their objects. Why did you choose this format instead of video?

We had planned on having it be video. The proposal to Metlife was all video. Then we started working with our local design and technology firms—Ziba Design and Fashionbuddha—and in the prototyping, it became clear we had to go another way.

We partnered with the Northwest Film Center to conduct workshops with community organizations around personal object storytelling. These really informed the project, and helped get the word out about the gallery. We rigged up a video recording booth in Fashionbuddha’s studios.

We found people would go in, do their story, come out, say it was so powerful and cathartic, but then the videos would be really bad—boring, too long, unstructured. They were often visually uncomfortable to watch. And some participants were turned off by the video recording—they found it too scary, and being on camera distracted them from telling their story – especially older people.

We had this moment where we were going to sign off on design and move to fabrication, and I was really worried. We had participants who loved the experience, but the watchers were really lukewarm about the results. And we realized of course that the majority audience would be watchers, not storytellers. We invited a cross-section of artists, filmmakers, and advertisers to join us for a think tank. We all sat down and looked at the content and we said, “this is not good enough, this is not watchable enough.”

So what did you do next?

We came up with a system that was much more structured and is based on audio, not video. In the current setup, you walk into the booth, all soundproofed and carpeted, and then you sit down on a cozy bench. You can come alone or with up to three people. You face a screen, and the screen is close enough to reach out and touch without getting up. The screen prompts you, with audio and with words, and it’s in both English and Spanish, because we really wanted to reach out to the Spanish-speaking community in Portland.

First, the screen asks if you want to watch an example story. If not, it says “let’s get started.”

There are five prompts that follow, and for each, you get 45 seconds to record a response. Each of the prompts was really carefully written and tested to scaffold people to tell a great story. People don’t necessarily walk in the booth knowing how to do that. For example, the first prompt, which is about discovery, asks, “When and how did you first receive, discover, or encounter your object? What was your first feeling or impression of it? Who was there?” This prompt really gets people sharing specifics, sharing details—the things that make a story successful.

Another good example is the final question: “If you had to give it to someone, who would it be and what would you say to them?” This question really makes people focus on the meat of what’s important about their object, and it’s a natural summarizer… but in an interesting, personal way.

After you record your audio, you get to take the photos and give your story a six-word title.

We experimented with when in the process to take the photos, and it’s nice at the end—it’s a kind of reward. The recording is often very intense—people cry, it takes something out of them. Photos are fun. We prompt participants to hold the object in different ways: close to camera, pose with the object in your lap, hold your object as close to your face as possible, hold it in profile.

How do you edit the stories?

Fashionbuddha built a backend content management system where you can choose audio segments, reorder them, and choose photos. This is made to be sustainable with current staffing– while we have the ability to edit within a 45 second chunk, 99% of the time we don’t do it—we just pick the segments and photos we want to use and put them in order.

The gallery also features objects from the museum’s collection with people’s stories about them. Who are the people who record stories about museum objects?

That is more curated. The first testing we did there was very much the same as Object Stories – anyone could sign up and get involved, pick an object in the museum and tell a story about it. Those stories were, frankly, often very banal. There was an imbalance between stories with people’s own objects, with which they have profound relationships, versus museum objects that they might come see once or twice and like, but not really have a deep connection with.

So we realized we had to have an equivalence–the museum stories had to be profound too. And it couldn’t all be curators, but these storytellers had to be people who had profound relationships with museum objects. We have four stories up now: from a guard, a curator, a longtime museum lover, and an artist. In the future, I’m thinking of really mining our membership, putting out a call to them, building some programs that might help us seed and support the museum stories.

The website for the stories is beautiful. You also got some prime physical real estate for this project. How did you get the gallery?

That was really hard-won. At first, it was going to be a little booth tucked away somewhere. As the project progressed, our prototyping showed us we didn’t want a shallow experience--a photo booth where you could just drop in and do it. We wanted something where people could spend the time and focus deeply on the experience at hand. That required more space.

And it was really important to the director and to me that Object Stories connected to our mission and to our collection. That led me to feel strongly that we needed to have museum objects in the space. It couldn’t be an educational space with no works of art in it. I wanted to integrate this experience into what you do in the rest of the museum. We ended up with a very multi-departmental team, and that helped too.

The big goal is to activate your connection with objects in the rest of the museum, that Object Stories models the idea of having deep relationships with objects for any visitor who comes in.

What do you know so far about the non-participating visitors to the gallery?

I only know anecdotally. People are really entranced with the stories, browsing them on the touchscreens, and with the museum objects as well. They even spend a long time looking at this big case we put up that just features 8x10 cards with photos of people with their objects.

I was surprised at how long many visitors will spend at this case. It’s just graphics. Why would people look at that? I think it may be because people are visually included in the space, and that’s rare in an art museum. They’re very interested and maybe even moved by it.

How False Conviction Could Help Science Centers Be More Human

It’s not every day that a science center releases an ebook about wrongful conviction in rape and murder cases. Then again, the New York Hall of Science isn’t just any science center. For a long time, I’ve admired their ambitious work, from exhibitions on complex topics like network science to integration of contemporary art into their galleries to incredible dedication to advancing the careers of diverse youth in Queens. Now, NYSCI is experimenting in a new medium, with a very tough and adult content focus. The result is False Conviction: Innocence, Guilt, and Science. 

I sat down with Eric Siegel, NYSCI’s Director and Chief Content Officer, to learn more about False Conviction. This interview is not really about an ebook. It’s about thinking about science centers and the public understanding of science as a human problem.

How did this project come about? 

I was at a planning meeting for NISE-NET in St. Paul five years ago. NISE-NET is probably the single largest investment that the National Science Foundation has made in informal learning, with the intention of spreading knowledge about nano science. We tried to find ways to make nano science interesting to the public, but it was mostly shiny futuristic potential that seemed to leave people cold. I cut out from the meeting by myself to check out an exhibition called Open House, if These Walls Could Talk at the Minnesota History Center.

I was struck by the mortality, pathos, and sense of loss that pervaded the exhibition. Not that it was sad, but that it was human. Contrasting that rich human narrative with the kind of gleamy tweaky technology narrative that was emerging from the NISE-NET meeting made me realize that generally speaking, science museums ignore many of the aspects of life that are the most resonant--mortality, sex, humor, tragedy, pity, joy. If there was a way to engage these deep emotions in the context of science museums, then there is an opportunity to expand our impact.

Two years later, I met Peter Neufeld, the head of The Innocence Project. Peter started telling me this absolutely fascinating and deep take on the way in which the misunderstanding of science is fundamental to the false convictions that The Innocence Project helps to overturn. On one side is DNA evidence, which was developed through the scientific method, and on the other side are a raft of quasi sciences and unreliable memories. Eyewitness identification is considered the gold standard of evidence to find guilt. And yet the plurality of cases that the Innocence Project has overturned were based upon eyewitness evidence. Even more amazingly, people turn out to be very susceptible to manipulation and frequently confess to crimes they did not commit.

I am listening to Peter go through this litany like the brilliant lawyer he is, and I am thinking that this is an amazing opportunity to put science in a very human context. Like so many chance meetings at conferences, we expressed interest in working together, but unlike most, we actually stuck with it.

I keep in my head a Venn diagram that has three circles--one is passion, the second is funding, and the third is audience. I am always looking for projects in which the intersection of those three circles is substantial. This project had that feel. We engaged with the Sloan Foundation, a leading funder in public understanding of science, who made a first time grant to NYSCI to plan the project. Peter and I brought in two equally passionate partners, Jim Dwyer, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the NY Times; and Geralyn Abinader, the former head of digital media at the American Museum of Natural History. Finally we engaged Theo Grey, one of the first developers for the iPad who had started a British company called Touch Press. So we had the key players.

I always have a strong feel for the passion and funding part of the venn diagram, but I am less confident of my understanding of our audiences. However, I was encouraged by the popularity of forensic science and the widespread and growing awareness of the problem of false convictions in our criminal justice system. I felt, and our partners agreed, that there was a great potential for a large audience for the project.

Is there a target audience for the project? If so, whom? 

It clearly is a book for adults. When Touch Press was doing their planning, they identified the target audience for the book as "educated and lefty." I like that, though I know that libertarians will find a lot to appreciate as well. My hope is that we can find a way to get it into the science and humanities classrooms in colleges and universities, and I am working on that.

It is a bit too sexual for most high schools, though one high school philosophy teacher reported using it to great effect. One of his students reflected:

Using the interactive iPad book to test my own reliability in crime scenes and investigations was really powerful. Feeling involved and somewhat responsible myself made me take the interactions seriously and I was even emotionally invested and ultimately disappointed at my own inaccuracies. Now knowing how difficult it is to put actual evidence together, not circumstantial or through coerced confessions, I feel more strongly than ever that we have to rely as much as possible on science to do this work fairly and justly.

Teachers and science conference organizers have been very enthusiastic and the sparse reviews on the iBook store has been positive. Anyone we can get to look at it and devote the time to it really seems to love it. But the key part seems to be getting people’s attention for a sustained engagement of 4-5 hours with a deep, rich, and harrowing set of content.

That’s not easy. I was struck by how this is partly interactive, but within a structured, linear narrative. How did you make decisions about how to structure the story? 

From the beginning, we knew this was fundamentally a book. We want 5 hours of your time to read this book. No website can deliver that kind of sustained attention. Our interactives were carefully designed not to lead one too far or for too long from the narrative. We didn't want people wandering through youtube videos, etc., but rather we wanted the interactive portions to illustrate parts of the narrative. Jim is the author and he is so brilliant and addresses the subject with such clarity and authority that we had a lot of trust in his sense of the structure of the book.

Why are you using the iBooks platform? It seems to limit availability.  

This is our biggest problem right now. When we started the project, we chose to work with Touch Press because of the quality of their work, but also because they had long-standing and deep connections into Apple's digital media group. They felt confident and had some assurances that our project would get a lot of visibility on the Apple iBooks store. It hasn't. Apple has a long history of ambivalence about its forays into education, and right now False Conviction is not getting the kind of exposure we want and need. We have always planned to make a non-interactive version of the book, both for epub/kindle and on paper, so we are working on that right now. Peter, Jim, and I have been doing some science conferences, but we haven't found the right way to get this very compelling project out further. The iBook story is a bit of a mystery and backwater, nothing like the App store, though it seems so similar. So we have learned a lot, and are working on building readership for the iPad version and also creating versions for other platforms.

While the content is really compelling, the audience and format are obviously challenging. This whole project is kind of risky. How do you figure out how to explore a new project like this? 

In the Venn diagram I described above, our certainty about the curatorial passion and funding were strong, but our understanding of the audiences and distribution were more experimental. I have tried to be very transparent with my colleagues and other stakeholders about the benefits of undertaking these experiments, to mixed success.

So it is not so much where I judge to take it, but rather the team's success in demonstrating its value to the goals of the institution. This requires that we be honest about what we have achieved and not assert that something is worth doing solely because we can get funding for it or because one of the program team is hot for the project. We're getting better at this. All that said, man are these brand new approaches invigorating, food for the mind, and great for finding really remarkable and creative staff. I am grateful every day for the opportunity to do this.

How does this project fit into the broader context of NYSCI? 

All of our work is focused on ways of broadening the invitation into science. We want to make projects that have a broad public invitation, that are human and humane, that are brilliantly executed, and that bring new ideas to the table. We want to demonstrate that NYSCI is thinking broadly and energetically about informal STEM learning, and that we continue to be recognized as a laboratory where creative ideas can emerge and be deployed. That is what we are trying to do in all the projects we have been working on, whether Design Lab, Human +, Connected Worlds, or False Conviction.

What are you ultimately hoping to achieve with this project? 

A few things. First I think the power of the image of falsely convicted people spending a couple of decades in prison knowing that they are innocent is a haunting and nightmarish scenario, a kind of Pit and the Pendulum, buried alive horror. Can we leverage the empathy that we have with people who are in that horrific situation to make people think more about how science has a real impact on our lives? Can we re-integrate deeper feelings, more humanity, into how we approach thinking and teaching about science?

There is a 20 minute video--a real video--in False Conviction of a young man confessing that he committed a murder that he *did not* commit. The two detectives interrogating him slowly close the noose on him, and it has the fascination of watching a boa constrictor kill and eat a small mammal. But we are watching a boy ruin his own life, in real time.

I am also really interested in the question of sustained attention, and how we can combine the sustained attention that one gives to a book or a movie with the sense of interactivity and participation that one gets from a good science museum exhibition. This question continues to vex our field as we continue to "design for distraction," piling one experience on top of another.

So from the affect and emotion of the project to the form of the project, I am hoping it helps our field think through some new options.

Ultimately we want to move people with the reality of these stories and the deep way in which science is central to the possibility of preventing or minimizing false convictions. The Innocence Project is a tremendously participatory project, with hundreds of volunteers around the country. Our hope is that this book engenders even more active participation. This is real stuff, with real consequences on real people's lives. More and more cities around this country are re-opening entire classes of cases to look at the possibility of the misapplication of science resulting in the dual tragedy of decades of innocent people’s lives being wasted and real criminals continuing to commit violent crimes. It is as personal and compelling as science gets.


False Conviction can be purchased through the iBook store and read on an iPad or an Apple computer running Mavericks through the iBook program. You can find it here. 

The Next Generation of Major Donors to Museums: Interview with David Gelles

Last week's New York Times special section on museums featured a lead article by David Gelles on Wooing a New Generation of Museum Patrons. In the article, David discussed ways that several large art museums are working to attract major donors and board members in their 30s and 40s.

The article both energized and frustrated me. I was excited to see coverage of an important issue of generational shift, but I was frustrated that it appeared to perpetuate traditional, clubbish standards of donor cultivation. I was curious to learn more about what was behind the article.

Fortunately, I had an outlet for my curiosity. David and I have known each other for a decade. We first met in Washington DC through a mix of social and professional circles. David describes himself as a "museum brat." He is the son of Bonnie Pitman, an extraordinary museum leader and educator who has served as director of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and as a board member for AAM. David introduced me to one of my museum heroes (and his godmother), Elaine Heumann Gurian. He grew up with a special love for and perspective on museums that makes his commentary particularly well-informed.

We've kept in touch over the years as our careers evolved--mine in museums, his in journalism--and I called David to learn more about the story behind the article.

NS: Why did you want to write this story?

DG: The initial idea really came from me trying to bridge my current beat – finance, Wall Street, mergers and acquisitions -- and thinking about how that can apply to the museum world. It struck me quite obviously that the people I cover on a day-to-day basis, especially the younger bankers, are some of the future major donors for museums. I cover all these guys who make 7, 8 figures a year. Inevitably, these are the people museums are going to want to attract to join the board and make major gifts.

At the same time, from my background in the museum world, I’ve gotten to know some of these boards and board members and see how they operate. By the time my mom was at the Bay Area Discovery Museum, I was in my late teens/twenties, and I started to know the board socially, including Bob Fisher, who is now very involved with SFMOMA. I’ve known Bob for 15 years now. We have some mutual understanding and trust. I knew something about this world.

NS: I struggled with your article because you note that these younger people are looking for something different from their donor experience, but many of the examples--the wining and dining--seems like same old, same old in terms of approach to engagement.

DG: Let me first note that this was very deliberately a piece about recruiting young donors who could give substantial gifts and join at the board level. Programmatic engagement is a very different story.

Wining and dining is always going to be a part of this donor cultivation. Let’s face it – people like to be social and have a drink. But I do think some of these examples are really something very different. For example, in the article I talk about SFMOMA and how they dealt with the museum being closed for renovation. They brought in Yves Behar onto their board, a designer in his 30s. He and some of the other younger board members were absolutely the key to get the museum out of the building and into the city. And it was through the younger patrons that they were able to spread SFMOMA all over the Bay Area.

NS: The article mentions that as part of that project, SFMOMA has an outpost in Los Altos. I have a kind of cynical perspective on that--that Los Altos is an extremely wealthy area and a place for donor cultivation, not for engaging people who might not otherwise experience art and art museums. I worry that some of these examples perpetuate income inequity and the perception of museums as  being for the 1%.

DG: I wrote this article coming to museums on their terms. I’m not trying to make value judgments about whether or not it’s a good thing that museums are cultivating wealthy patrons. The fact is that large institutions are heavily reliant on big donations. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is really not the story I wrote.

I do think it’s fair to ask whether museums have become too complex, too expensive – incredibly complex, incredibly expensive to run and maintain -- and that necessitates an incredible high level of giving. In an age of high income inequity, that means you have to focus on major gifts from major donors. And rising income inequality means fewer individuals have the capacity to make major gifts – not less money to go around, but fewer pocketbooks.

NS: It seems like some of the giant institutions in the article--the MoMAs of the world--will probably be just fine with their Young Collectors groups and so on. But the generational shift seems much more threatening to the vast majority of museums that are smaller, not in huge cities, not big names.

DG: Absolutely. Smaller, less marquee institutions may face problems going forward. I included the Delaware Art Museum as an example of this. 

There are a couple of key demographic trends that impact this. There is wealthy flight back into the cities – that’s left a lot of regional and more rural institutions exposed. There's also the transience issue. It's just not the case anymore that professionals are likely to stay in one place for their entire career, especially with our generation. There's an example from Minneapolis in the article about this--a donor that the Walker Art Center was cultivating who moved to New York. This isn't just happening at the highest income levels: it's generational. In the last five years, I’ve moved from Berkeley to Miami to SF to NY... and I wouldn't be surprised if I move again.

NS: Transience seems like a really interesting issue here. What are some of the ways that you saw organizations addressing this mobility of donors and prospects?

DG: When new money comes to town, institutions need to be pretty quick on their feet. The ICA in Boston probably did a pretty good job of that. They saw a confluence of an emerging biotech community with the fact that the institution was going to expand rapidly and they were able to tap into and engage those academic/biotech leaders as donors.

NS: I'm curious to hear more about your experience working with these young bankers on Wall Street. One of the things you covered a bit in the article is some of the reports out there about how younger donors want to be engaged differently--seeking more accountability, wanting their money to go to active projects as opposed to endowments or long-term operating. Is that something you see when you look at the young bankers you cover on a daily basis?

DG:I didn't do exhaustive reporting on this directly, but yes, I think so. I think of one friend of mine who is involved in several museums in New York City, a very successful young banker who very deliberately chooses smaller museums where he can see his money at work. He funds smaller exhibitions, maybe is able to build a relationship with a curator, feel like his voice is heard. He very intentionally choses that versus being one of 600 in the Met’s Young Patrons group. He likes that intimacy. That’s a kind of accountability in itself.

NS: I guess a bigger question about these bankers is the extent to which they are involved philanthropically, irrespective of focus. It's one of the big questions where I am, near Silicon Valley. There's a lot of stress about whether a culture of philanthropy exists with young wealth, or whether people would rather be spending the money on themselves or deploying it differently, like through impact investing.

DG: There is a culture of young philanthropy in NYC, perhaps in contrast with Silicon Valley. In New York, it’s deeply woven into the fabric of the social scene. The social calendar is dictated by galas. There is party season at the end of the year. And then there’s spring party season. That’s a real part of the social currency of the town – and to attend, you have to buy tickets, buy a table, get invited.

When it comes to the donor experience, other communities could probably learn a thing or two from New York. Take San Francisco: there actually is a stable population of people who built their careers in Silicon Valley. A lot of institutions could find whatever that community is and find ways to create those long-term ties. New York is not the only city with a social calendar.

NS: Sure. But another way to look at it is that these galas and this social calendar perpetuate a kind of cultural elitism that exacerbates class disparity. I think what I struggle with most is the sense I get, throughout the article, that this kind of old-guard cultural elitism is being perpetuated for younger generations.

DG: I don’t think museum parties are perpetuating class disparity.

NS: Really? The other lead article in the Museums section was about protests at the Guggenheim, branding that museum as the "1% museum." What do you think the Guggenheim 1% thing is about?

DG: I could see how some people would view events like those at the Guggenheim and other big institutions as a manifestation of class disparity. And of course it is a reflection of certain haves and have nots in society. But I don’t think the museums and the museums' social programs are what are perpetuating class disparity. It might be a reflection of that disparity, but I don’t think they are responsible. 

NS: I guess as someone who runs a small museum that isn't in New York, I struggle with this kind of coverage that seems to perpetuate the dominance of a story about what museums are that is not reflective of the broader population--of people or museums. I worry that this kind of article problematizes our conversations in smaller communities by focusing attention on examples that aren't really relevant to our experience. 

DG: I'm sorry you feel that way. That's not representative of most of the feedback I've been getting. 

I don’t think the lesson is that you have to have a huge fancy party in the atrium to cultivate new donors. That’s not the point. The point of the article is that there’s a generational shift happening here, the next generation has different philanthropic priorities, and museums are finding a variety of ways to try to build bridges.

NS: That makes sense. I appreciate what you are trying to do. And so let's end on a positive note: in the best case, what do you hope the article will do?

DG: I hope it will serve as a prompt for institutions of all sizes across the country take seriously the need to engage with a new generation of donors and visitors. Though that wasn’t the thrust of the article, it’s really part and parcel of the same thing.

But Bob Fisher alluded to it in the article with his quote about a sleepy museum of antiquities. If you are a sleepy institution, it’s going to be hard to get this generation, our generation, involved at a programmatic and a philanthropic level. I have a hard time saying that, because I love little antiquities in vitrines. But I would have a hard time making that a philanthropic priority.

That’s the tension: how can museums, which are still temples of culture, do a bunch of things at once? They need to do what they have evolved to do—maintain an ever-expanding collection, much of which isn’t on display and needs to be storied, insured, conserved, plus doing their own curating to be programmatically relevant, displaying outside exhibits, and then of course trying to do public programming that gets through the door people who might not want to stare at beautiful little objects like I do. Add to that engaging this new generation – both through programming and as donors. Museums have a lot of work to do.

My hope is that this article demonstrates some of the ways that some big institutions have done it somewhat successfully and also serve as a clarion call to the rest to take it seriously.

How do you grapple with engaging the next generation of major donors at your institution? Are you finding ways to do so that are changing as your museum and your community changes?