The Art of Gathering: A Fabulous Book to Help You Host Better Meetings and Events

I remember the first staff meeting I ever ran. I had just started at the MAH as the new executive director. The museum was in huge financial trouble. I wasn't sure we were going to make payroll that week. But I also had a more immediate problem: I had no idea how to lead a staff meeting. I felt like a new teacher on the first day of school. Everyone's eyes on me, expecting something. I had no idea what to do.

I didn't know how to open a meeting. I didn't know how hold power and share it. I didn't know how to kick off a productive conversation, make group decisions, or close a meeting with energy. I knew that I didn't want to replicate the droning report-fests I'd encountered in other jobs... but I felt like I didn't have any alternative formats to draw on.

The weird thing is that that wasn't true. I'd spent years leading workshops around the world as a consultant. My expertise was on inviting strangers to participate in public settings like museums. I had lots of creative formats for drawing people out, sharing stories, and working collaboratively. I had tools to achieve everything I wanted to achieve in that staff meeting. But for some reason, I applied none of those lessons to my new situation. It was as if I had bought a new car and lost all memory of how to drive.

Priya Parker's wonderful book The Art of Gathering shares the core principles of how to drive. Whether you dream of better meetings or you're planning a community festival, I urge you to read this book. Parker argues that all events--from team meetings and picnics to conferences and weddings--are opportunities to come together with purpose. The book explains how to host events with purpose, drawing lessons from intimate parties, mass happenings, and international summits. This is one of those rare non-fiction books with the killer trifecta: strong stories, specific takeaways, powerful vision. It made me feel more confident about what I already know and eager to push myself further. It's an easy read, and if you're like me, you'll want to put it into practice right away.

Here are my three big takeaways from The Art of Gathering:

1. Hosting is an exercise in courageous leadership. When you host an event, you have the power to define what happens. It takes courage to assume that power. If you shrug it off, you hurt the event. Too often, a conference moderator will tell each panelist they have exactly five minutes, and then do nothing when a speaker heads into his 18th minute at the podium. Too often, a dinner party host will airily encourage guests to "get to know each other," without providing fuel for connection. When we abdicate hosting responsibility in an attempt to practice humility or democracy, all we do is let someone else take over. Instead, Parker encourages all event hosts to adopt a stance of "generous authority." Take the lead. Set the table. Invite people into participation. Redirect when needed, even if it feels uncomfortable. You'll end up doing more work than usual--and getting the results you want.
2. When participants are diverse, explicit rules help. I admit: I've never been a fan of events that start with the group writing rules for the day. It always feels contrived and dreary to me. Of course we know not to look at our phones, or to listen with respect. But Parker makes the point that the more diverse the participants at an event, the less likely that they have shared expectations about etiquette or ground rules. Creating event-specific rules can level the playing field, make the implicit explicit, and create a specific culture for the event. Parker calls these event rules "pop up rules," and they can be as silly or serious as desired. First names only. Everyone must wear a hat. Sit next to a stranger. These kinds of rules have the surprising dual effect of helping people know what to expect AND making events more memorable.
3. Strong events deserve strong endings. Many events close with a whimper when we yearn for a bang. The end of an event is one of those moments when the host has to actively practice leadership (and often abdicates). The host has to decide to close the discussion. To clear the plates. If you don't decide as host, people will straggle away, some exhausted, some feeling guilty, all missing out on the opportunity for a shared closing moment. At work and at conferences, we're often "saved by the bell" of the clock telling us the time is up. But why are we letting the clock close our meetings for us? If we open meetings with purpose, we should close them that way too. Closing rituals seal the shared experience of the event and launch us back into the real world with the event's imprint on our hearts.

The Art of Gathering expanded my understanding of what it means to build a powerful culture of participation. Events are not all logistics and content. The way you welcome, the way you host, the rules you make, the way you say goodbye--all these play major roles as well. As Parker writes in the introduction: "Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try." Sounds like great participation to me.

Platform Power: Scaling Impact

Last month, I sat in the back of a meeting room at the MAH and watched something extraordinary happen. Our county board of supervisors had brought their official meeting to the museum. They were off-site for the first time in years, holding a special study session sparked by an exhibition about foster youth, Lost Childhoods. The supervisors toured the exhibition with some of the 100+ local partners who helped create it. Then, for an hour, former foster youth who helped design the exhibition shared their stories with supervisors. They spoke powerfully and painfully about their experiences. They shared their hopes. They urged the politicians to fix a broken system. It felt like something opened up, right in that room, between the flag and the tissues and the microphones. It felt like change was breaking through.

This was not an event orchestrated by the MAH. It happened because two of our Lost Childhood partners urged it into being. They negotiated with the County. They set the table. They made something real and meaningful happen.

They did it because the exhibition belonged to them. They helped conceive it, plan it, and build it. The Lost Childhoods exhibition is a platform for 100+ partners to share their stories, artwork, ideas, projects, volunteer opportunities, and events.

Nine years ago, I wrote a post called The Future of Authority: Platform Power. In it, I argued that museums could give up control of the visitor experience while still maintaining (a new kind of) power. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. There is power IN the platform--power to shape the way people participate. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum.

Nine years later, I still believe this. Now that I run a museum, I experience the variety of ways we can create platforms that empower community members to do certain things, in certain ways, that amplify the institution. The power IN the platform is real. But I've also become reenergized about the power OF the platform for those community members who participate. I value platforms for their power to scale impact.

Traditionally, museums and cultural organizations offer programs. Staff produce them for, and sometimes with, visitors. Each program has a fixed cost, and expanding that program means expanding that cost. If it takes a staff member 5 hours to run a screen-printing workshop, it takes her ten hours to run it twice. Even a smash hit program is hard to scale up in this model.

At the MAH, we've tried wherever possible to break out of unidirectional program models. We believe that we can most effectively empower and bridge community members (our strategic goal) if we invite them to share their skills with each other. This is the participatory platform model. Instead of staff running workshops, our staff connect with local printmaking collectives. We ask them what their goals are for outreach and community connection. And then we support and empower them to lead workshops and festivals and projects on our site. Instead of "doing the thing" directly, our staff make space for community members to do the thing--and to do so beautifully, proudly, with and for diverse audiences.

Does this work scale better than programs? It's not always obvious from the start whether it will. This work is relationship-heavy, and those relationships take time to build. When we created an exhibition with 100 community members impacted by the foster care system, it took almost a year to recruit, convene, open up, explore, and create the products and the trust to build those products well. But that investment in building a platform paid off.

When you build relationships in a platform, you build participants' power. Platforms can accommodate lots of partners and support them taking the projects in new directions. Since opening in July, exhibition partners haven't just planned a County supervisors' meeting. They've led over 50 exhibition-related community events at and beyond the MAH. They've created powerful learning experiences, diverse audiences, and new program formats. Our staff could never produce all this activity on our own. We put our energy into empowering partners, which ignited their passion and ability to extend the exhibition to new people and places.

Whereas a program is a closed system, a platform is an open one. In a platform model, more is not more staff time and cost. More is more use of the platform, more participants empowered to use it to full potential.

As our organization grows, we are looking for more ways to adopt a platform mindset. Now that we've opened Abbott Square, we have a goal to offer free cultural programming almost every day of the week. This means a huge shift for the MAH (previously we offered 2 monthly festivals plus a few scattered events). How will we increase our event offerings so aggressively? We're not planning to do it by adding a lot of staff to programming the space. We're planning to do it by building new platforms. We are learning from our "monthly festival" platform and building a lightweight, more flexible version. We want to make it easier for community groups to plug in, offering their own workshops and festivals and events, with our support. If we can create the right platform for daily events, it serves our community, by giving them the support, space, and frequent events they desire. It advances our theory of change, by empowering locals and bridging their diverse communities. And it puts the MAH at the center of the web of activity, as a valued partner and platform provider.

Building platforms is not the same as building programs. It flexes new muscles, requires different skill sets. But to me, the benefit is clear. In a platform model, our community takes us further than we could ever go on our own.

The Art of Relevance Sneak Peek: How the London Science Museum Became More Relevant to Deaf Families

This month, I'm sharing a few chapters from my new book The Art of Relevance in advance of its release. I wrote this book because of a fundamental curiosity about what relevance is and how it works. Here's one of my favorite stories about the London Science Museum and their work to make their science shows relevant to families with deaf or hearing-impaired family members. 

This chapter appears midway through the book. The Art of Relevance has a central metaphor that relevance is a key that unlocks the door to meaningful experiences (which live in a room). To get into this chapter, imagine that your institution/program/art is a room. There are doors through which people enter your room. This chapter explores the difference between connecting with new people by building new doors vs. connecting with new people by changing the content of the room.

Build a Door or Change the Room?

Once you understand your community of interest, you have a choice. You can build relevance by constructing new doors. Or you can change the programming within the room itself. Or both.

How can you decide when to build new doors, when to change the room, and when to do both?

Building new doors is a form of marketing. When you build a new door, you invite someone new into a pre-existing room. This strategy is successful when you have an existing room with a compelling experience and a credible sense that that experience will be relevant to your audience of interest. Remember New World Symphony, the Miami orchestra that used night club marketing techniques to attract young urbanites to classical music? Or the promotores at the Waukegan Public Library sharing their offerings with Latino immigrants? They are in the door-building business. Building new doors, wider doors, or doors that are open different hours of the day works when you think you have the right programming to offer your community of interest—you just need to find them and invite them into the room in a welcoming manner.

Changing the room means changing programming. If you think the experience you have to offer will be challenging, confounding, or off-putting for your audience of interest, you can’t just build them a door and hope for the best. You are going to have to change what you actually offer to make it relevant, as opposed to just changing how you market it. Think of the Subjects to Change teen program, or the free lunches at the Cleveland Public Library. These new programs fundamentally altered their institution’s offerings. When communities of interest avoid your programming regardless of your marketing investments, you need to change the room. If people attend once and don’t come back, it’s probably a problem with the experience and not the marketing.

It’s not always easy to make these distinctions in the real world. There are many times when we need to change the room but focus only on the door—or we embark on a room renovation and ignore the fact that the existing door doesn’t give people a sense of what has changed inside.

Imagine two institutions in an ethnically-diverse city. Each decides to invest in providing content in English and Spanish as part of an effort to increase relevance to their communities. Institution A makes all its marketing materials bilingual, but changes nothing about the languages spoken inside its walls. Institution B recruits new Spanish-speaking staff to offer programs in both languages, but makes no changes to its monolingual marketing materials.

A is working the door. B is shifting the room. Each has made remarkable strides towards their goal, but each is limited by how far they’ve gone. Will Spanish-speaking outsiders walk into A expecting experiences en espanol and walk out disappointed? Will outsiders ignore B’s programming entirely, not knowing it is para ellos?

The obvious answer is that you need both A and B. Many times, we find that we need both new doors and changed rooms, but we don’t know how to sequence them for the greatest impact.

That’s what happened at the London Science Museum as they worked to make their science shows relevant to deaf audiences. The museum’s science shows are family-oriented presentations by high-energy performers, full of surprising experiments and explosions. Museum staff knew the shows appealed to diverse families, and they wanted to reach deaf families in particular. So they started with a new door and a slight shift to the room. They marketed the shows to deaf families at the door, and provided a sign language interpreter at the presentations in the room.

The new door and shifted room were a start, but they weren’t enough. Only a handful of deaf families walked in the door, and what they got wasn’t satisfying. The marketing and the changes to the science shows weren’t working. For hearing audiences, the high energy of the presenter, combined with the visual and audial bangs of the experiments, made for an exciting show. But for deaf audiences, the experience was frustrating. The sign language interpreter was off to the side, far from the scientific action. That placement made it hard for deaf people to both see the fiery displays and follow the interpreter’s information. The interpreter was not a high-enthusiasm actor like the presenter, which dampened the overall energy of the experience. And any loud audial bangs were either completely inaudible, or in some cases, distressing, for people who were deaf and hard of hearing.

The Museum had made a real commitment to deaf families, and they wanted to get it right. They decided to try again. They took a step back and asked deaf families to help them. The Museum recruited deaf families to come in, and they did some special pilot shows for deaf families only. Hearing staff members couldn’t identify the issues that made the shows unappealing for deaf families—but deaf people could. The focus groups helped the Museum understand the need for sign language performers, not just interpreters. They helped the Museum consider the varied needs of their families, which often included both hearing and hearing-impaired family members. They helped the Museum understand that word of mouth was the most important form of marketing in their tight-knit community, and that that community wanted more opportunities to get together socially. The families gave loads of feedback, which prompted the Museum to change their approach.

The Museum moved away from the idea of sign language interpretation as an amenity to layer onto individual science shows. Instead, staff created a monthly Saturday afternoon event called SIGNtific, geared specifically to deaf families but inclusive of all. At the door, SIGNtific days are not solely about science programming. They are about deaf-led community experiences with science. SIGNtific’s new door is more relevant to deaf families and their expressed interests.

And then inside the room, they changed the shows. Instead of offering sign language interpretation as an add-on, SIGNtific shows flip the roles of presenter and interpreter. The presenters up front doing the experiments are deaf performers, supplemented by off-stage performers who provide voiceovers for hearing guests. While having sign language interpreters off to the side was a barrier to comprehension, voiceover interpretation causes no such problems. Hearing audience members can fully participate in the shows, watching the deaf performers onstage and listening to voiceover interpretation. Furthermore, the staff designed SIGNtific shows to ensure that audible bangs or noises are not essential to the scientific concepts conveyed. Which means the whole family—and anyone else who happens to visit the museum on SIGNtific days—can have a relevant, enjoyable experience with the science shows.

The Science Museum didn’t need to have a brilliant sense of the needs of deaf families to become relevant to them. They just had to be open to feedback and guidance from their new audience. They learned from their community of interest. They fixed what was broken. They changed the door and the room.

Setting Your Mission Free in the Wild

Where are you most able to execute your mission: inside your facility, or outside of it?

There are a lot of reasons we focus on work inside our facilities. Our facilities are, ideally, spaces optimized for mission execution. Galleries purpose-made to show artwork. Performance halls perfectly tuned for the orchestra. Archives with climate control to protect artifacts.

But I'm increasingly seeing organizations (mine included) expand beyond our walls. In churches. On sidewalks. In health centers and hospitals and laundromats and housing developments. The Irvine Foundation recently published a great study on this phenomenon.

Why go out to these other spaces? We tend to focus on two reasons:

1. It's where the people are. Or at least, it's where certain people are, people who you want to connect with but who choose not to walk through your doors. This seems to be the primary driver behind partnerships with organizations that serve specific target groups, whether those be homeless adults or preschoolers or ESL students. It's also the driver behind participation in events with huge visibility potential, such as farmer's markets or community festivals.
2. As our missions shift, our buildings can't always keep up. The facility that was perfectly primed for the organization founded in 1920 may not fit the needs of 2015. Many organizations end up fighting their facilities--and pouring money into their operation--instead of using them as a springboard for amazing work.

I've been thinking recently more and more about a third reason for going outside: it's where the mission takes flight.

This reason is specific to taking programming outdoors, in the public sphere. Outdoor festivals, plays, and concerts have an energy that gets dampened and contained indoors. The outdoors absorbs difference comfortably; you can come or go, eat or talk, participate in different ways without alerting concern. And outdoor events proselytize themselves; anyone walking by can get a glimpse, a taste, a sensory solicitation to come take part. People share viral videos of flash mob orchestras in grocery stores and operas on the street because these events set isolated art forms free.

This isn't just true of the arts: think of an outdoor capoeria class, dog festival, or co-working meetup. When we take our interests and micro-communities into the public sphere, we bring them into the light. Yes, the space is more chaotic, less intentionally-designed--and that may mean that the experience is less intense than in purpose-built facility. The magic can be more diffuse, the audience less attentive. But the benefits of the open air, the open invitation to partake, often seem to outweigh these negatives.

Even someone walking by who doesn't participate can have his day altered by what he saw or heard. If we walk by many outdoor fitness classes, we may feel more motivated to exercise. If we walk by many public art installations, we may feel more inspired to create. If we walk by music and culture and conversations and kindness, we may feel better about ourselves and our community.

None of this contact happens if these activities are trapped inside buildings. The magic stays locked inside. Sometimes, that works--and you feel the special hum of "just us" sharing the experience. But often, the magic could go further.

How many of the best things you're doing are locked behind doors? How might things change if you could do them out on the street?

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment or question, you can join the conversation here.

Want to Activate Public Space? We're Hiring... And Some Thoughts on Iteration and Temporary Positions

For the past two years, I've been working on a project to activate the concrete space adjacent to our museum as a vibrant, community plaza. After years of community town halls, design, and prototyping, we're finally starting to build our dream. It's an exciting, intense, educational time.

We are hiring a temporary contract curator to activate the plaza this summer with 25+ cultural events. The goal is two-fold:

1. to start engaging the plaza as a creative, event-filled, vibrant space.
2. to experiment with different kinds of events (time of day, audience, size, type) and get a sense of how we can best program the space in the longterm.

The ideal candidate has a good grasp of our local artistic assets in Santa Cruz County, a knack for participatory placemaking, and enthusiasm about putting on a show... multiple times per week. If you are interested and want to learn more (including how to apply), click here. 

Capital projects are sexy and exciting, but they are also finite and physical. That makes me nervous. My engineering training taught me to design through iteration. I'm at my best when we can tinker, prototype, and continuously improve our work through a series of small experiments.

This iterative approach is great for growth in an existing organization. But in the case of Abbott Square (the plaza in question), we're building something new. It's literally a project in concrete. We can iterate somewhat, but at some point, we have to make decisions about how the space will work--and those decisions can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The size and import of some of these decisions worry me--not because we'll make bad decisions, but because they are so definite.

There's an apocryphal story about a college campus where they started with no concrete paths, and then eventually laid paths where students' shoes were causing wear in the grass. Lovely story, but when you are laying concrete, it is really, really hard to wait for the shoes before building the paths.

How can we wait for the shoes? That's part of the reason we are hiring a temporary contract curator instead of a permanent position. We want to try walking around before we define the program plan for Abbott Square.

Eventually, we will hire a full-time person to curate Abbott Square. But we don't yet know whether that person will be focusing primarily on booking movie nights or launching sketching clubs or engaging buskers... or all of the above. This temporary pilot allows us to test out the possibilities. We can see what works best in the space, and by extension, what kind of person will best make it happen.

I'm curious whether other organizations have taken this kind of approach with positions in new venues/projects/expansions. How do you know who you need before you open? How do you experiment and course-correct as people wear their own paths into the space?


If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment, you can join the conversation here.

How Museum Hack Transforms Museum Tours: Interview with Dustin Growick

A new company in New York, Museum Hack, is reinventing the museum tour from the outside in. They give high-energy, interactive tours of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The tours are pricey, personalized, NOT affiliated with the museums involved… and very, very popular.

Today on Museum 2.0, an interview with Dustin Growick. Dustin is a science instructor at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) by day, Museum Hack tour developer/leader at AMNH by night. 

How did you first get involved with Museum Hack? 

Dustin: About a year ago I met a couple of people from Museum Hack at a conference. They were “preaching the museum gospel” in NYC via alternative tours at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was intrigued and curious to learn more, but also skeptical of the merits of an outside group running roughshod in The Met.

So I went on a tour…and experienced the museum in an entirely new way. I heard incredible—and often salacious—stories behind hidden gems I’d walked past numerous times. We interacted with the art and with each other through dynamic photo challenges, kinesthetic activities, and conversations. We discussed impressionism from Manet to Monet, and delved deeper in pointillism and Greek sculpture. Heck, I even learned about a 17th century German drinking game. For the first time in a long time, I was personally interacting and engaging with the museum, the collection, and with complete strangers in a way that highlighted the art. 

When the opportunity to design my own two-hour museum adventure at the American Museum of Natural History presented itself, I jumped at the chance. I’ve been leading my own Museum Hack tours at AMNH for about 9 months now. The tours boil down to three key things: engagement, relevance and fun. I want to help people find interactive and accessible points of entry and give them the tools to curate their own experience during every museum visit.

Can you give an example of the kind of Museum Hack activity that makes this different from other museum tours? 

Here’s an example that I experienced on that first tour of the Met. While in the American Portrait Gallery, we played a game called Matchmaker Matchmaker. Here’s how it goes:

• Take a few minutes to allow a subject in one of the paintings to “find you”. It can be a human or an animal, and they can be the main focus of the piece or some strange-looking fellow lurking in the background. Go to whatever piques your interest and draws you in. 
• Use both the posted information and your imagination to come up with a simple backstory for this individual. What is their name? Why are they in this scene? Where did they get that phenomenal feather boa? 
• Find a partner or get matched with a partner. You now have exactly two minutes to concoct the epic love story that brings together the two characters you’ve chosen. 
• As you stand amongst the portraits, share your tale of deception, love, mystery, and intrigue with the rest of the group. 

During this simple, ten-minute activity, we curated our own experience by practicing “high levels of noticing” and by investigating museum signage on the wall and online. We were encouraged to use our smartphones to search accession numbers if we wanted to dig deeper than the copy on the wall. We shared what captivated and spoke to us on a personal level, not just what we were told was “important." But perhaps most significantly, we used the art and the subjects therein as jumping off points for bringing the museum collection to life.

Who is the audience for Museum Hack? You are a museum insider and a content geek. But I know that Nick Gray, the Museum Hack founder, often emphasizes that Museum Hack is for people who don’t love (or even like) museums. 

We at Museum Hack have gone back and forth about our target audience: is it people that don’t like museums that we want to convert, or people who want a more personal experience, or people who want an active museum experience?

I don’t think anyone who doesn’t like museums would ever pay for a tour. Then again, many of our most passionate participants are somewhat ambivalent towards museums--or people who are daunted by the Met or AMNH and want a more personalized experience. I think of us guides as “museum personal trainers”. Whether you’re an art history buff, a professional athlete, or don’t think you even like museums, sometimes all you need is a little help using the equipment.

How do you advertise Museum Hack? If you want to get people who are not already interested in museums, how would they even know to look for you? 

Social media and word of mouth. It started with word of mouth, and then it got much, much bigger. Now a ton of our business comes from TripAdvisor reviews and Zerve - a ticketing website. We’re one of the top-rated destination tours to do in NYC. The reviews are so positive. And then during the tours themselves, we’re hashtagging, tweeting - that is promotional too.

When we became more known on these trip planning websites, it shifted our audience. It used to be mostly young New Yorkers. Now we have a larger and more diverse audience, including a lot of tourists who are thinking of going on tours anyway.

Are there differences between the Museum Hack experience at the Met and AMNH? I imagine that there are a lot more presumed barriers to break down at an art museum than a science museum. Dinosaurs seem pretty accessible. 

There’s a certain level of assumed stuffiness or pretention at the Met. We do a good job of breaking down those boundaries--and maybe those tours involve a little more swearing and silliness. As far as AMNH goes, there’s a little bit of that, but we focus more on offering a more personal experience, finding ways to engage with things in the space and make them personally relevant to you. One of the big ones is that we bring the people behind the artifacts to life. I don’t think on a normal tour they talk so much about the badass character and life experience of the explorers and revolutionaries behind the specimens.

How do you start a Museum Hack tour in a way that signals the different experience ahead? How do you manage the diverse people on the tour who may want different things from it? 

We have a specific opening activity to bring the group together. We huddle up, share what you should expect from the tour, and introduce everyone. Everyone puts their hands in the middle--like a sports team--and does a cheer. From the start, you are face to face with strangers. We use language throughout the tour to encourage the interpersonal, e.g. “make eye contact with two new museum friends.”

It also helps that we generally sell out at 8 people, and the guide always has a co-host if the group gets that big. Having two guides means we can do split stops at some places, giving some people one experience and some another. It allows a little more freedom, and it also gives people many voices and personalities to engage with.

It seems like there are two ways to look at Museum Hack. One is that you have completely reimagined what a museum tour can be, and for whom. The other is that you have produced the most excellent version of a museum tour—more engaging, more personalized, more entertaining. Which description do you think is more accurate? 

That’s a tough question. I think that for the two museums in which we work, it might be A. But for museums in general, it's B. There are definitely elements of what we do in use at other institutions and in other contexts, and this leads me to believe that B is a more accurate description. But as far as The Met and AMNH go, I think we've totally reimagined the tour experience (A).

How has Museum Hack informed your day job as a museum educator? 

It has made me a better educator and added tremendous value for the audiences with which I work, both at NYSCI and on Museum Hack tours. Ultimately, it hinges on coming back—time after time—to the same five questions:

1. Why should my audience care about [insert content]? 
2. How does [insert content] relate to their lives and their interests?
3. What are the tangible points of relevancy that will engage my learners on a personal level? 
4. Am I giving people the tools necessary to curate their own museum experience during repeat visits? 
5. What is my “ask” of my audience? What are their “next steps”? 

Museum Hack let me step outside the routine context of my normal scope of work to really explore the core concepts of interactivity, engagement and relevancy. It’s made the museum experiences I facilitate more enjoyable, longer-lasting, and much more meaningful.

But you don’t have to take my word for it: next time you’re in New York, shoot me an e-mail. We’d love to give you a first-hand taste of the Museum Hack special sauce, and prove to you why we truly believe that Museums Are F***ing Awesome.

You can share your questions and comments directly with Dustin here in the comments section or by emailing him at dustin@museumhack.com

Teenagers, Space-Makers, and Scaling Up to Change the World

This week, my colleague Emily Hope Dobkin has a beautiful guest post on the Incluseum blog about the Subjects to Change teen program that Emily runs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

Subjects to Change is an unusual museum program in that it explicitly focuses on empowering teens as community leaders. While art, history, creativity, and culture are the vehicles for that empowerment, the teens involved spend a lot of their time with activists, civic leaders, and social psychologists. They describe themselves as "a group of chronic doodlers who dig music, embrace creativity of all kinds, and are determined to not only make our community better, but want to get other teens involved."

Emily's post shares three things Subjects to Change has taught her about youth and community leadership. I want to return the favor with three things this project brings up for me.

Community-building/engagement is related to but not identical to content engagement. Subjects to Change isn't an art club or a history group. It's about empowerment and community leadership through art and history. One of the reasons Emily took this approach was based on what we saw in the ecology of teen programs. We heard from youth program leaders at museums who struggle to keep teens engaged despite a huge amount of committed resources. We saw a lot of intense hand-holding and not a lot of youth ownership. In contrast, when we looked at the programs we admire most locally, they all are fundamentally focused on youth as leaders and changemakers in their own lives and community. Whether they are using skateboarding to grind out child hunger or changing their own fate through farming, we saw teens taking agency and being leaders in ways we hadn't seen in arts organizations.

This meant really stripping back to our mission in developing this program and being willing to let the teens lead us in some unexpected directions. For example, they are planning a series of teen nights at the museum, complete with art activities, history exploration, youth bands, etc., but themed around community issues like "public safety" and "gender representation."

I'm completely curious as to whether their peers will actually want to come to a museum on a Friday night about public safety. I'm a little amazed that this is happening at the museum at all. It's hard to imagine a staff member pitching a public safety-themed event and everyone feeling like it is a good idea. But every step of the way these teens have shown that the issues they care about are compelling to lots of people (of all ages) in our community, and that they are ready to do meaningful work to engage people around those issues.

Scale is still a challenge for co-creative work. Subjects to Change engages fifteen teenagers. Many are having a life-changing experience, but still, it's fifteen people. How do we scale this impact to reach more people? This is a chronic problem of in-depth co-creative projects. In many museums, these tend to be youth-focused projects. In lean years, it's hard to justify focusing so many resources on a small group.

Watching these teens do their work has expanded my thinking on the issue of scale. If these teens truly become community leaders through their work with us, they will extend their impact beyond themselves. They are forming partnerships in the community, developing events to reach more teens, and developing content for general museum events. We are already seeing a difference in the makeup of our audience on the nights that these teens are involved because of their attendant communities.

This makes me realize that a leadership-focused program is fundamentally different than one that focuses inward. A city council, for example, is necessarily small and consumes a ton of resources. If outreach and community leadership is the meat of the program, maybe the scale problem isn't as big an issue as I had previously thought.

Space-making is magic. I've written before about Beck Tench's beautiful framing of how "every risk-taker needs a space-maker" to clear the path for experimentation. Emily's generous first line of her blog post makes me realize that this concept of "space-making" is bigger than just supporting risk-taking. It's about making space for real change to happen, and to grow, throughout an organization and a community. I am starting to wonder how we could take this lens to more of the work we do, both as managers internally and as facilitators of community experiences externally. Space-making may be the ultimate strategy for scaling up.

Using Social Bridging to Be "For Everyone" in a New Way

Like a lot of organizations, my museum struggles with two conflicting goals:

1. The museum should be for everyone in our community.
2. It's impossible for any organization or business to do a great job being for everyone. We're more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them.

How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target? In the past, I've subscribed to the theory that an organization should target many different groups and types of people to serve a constellation of specific audiences across diverse affinities, needs, and interests. 

But ultimately, that's still targeting. It's still grouping. And while it may be effective when it comes to marketing, it's limiting if your mission is to reach and engage with a wide range of people. It can lead to parallel programming: bike night for hipsters, bee night for hippies, family night for kiddies. And rarely the twain shall meet.

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we're approaching this challenge through a different lens: social bridging. One of our core programming goals is to build social capital by forging unexpected connections between diverse collaborators and audience members. We intentionally develop events and exhibitions that matchmake unlikely partners--opera and ukelele, Cindy Sherman and amateur photographers, welding and knitting. Our goal in doing this work is to bring people together across difference and build a more cohesive community.  

We have been explicitly focusing on social bridging for more than a year now. What started as a series of experiments and happy accidents is now embedded in how we develop and evaluate projects. We've seen surprising and powerful results--visitors from different backgrounds getting to know each other, homeless people and museum volunteers working together, artists from different worlds building new collaborative projects. Visitors now spontaneously volunteer that "meeting new people" and "being part of a bigger community" are two of the things they love most about the museum experience.

This has led to a surprising outcome: we are now de-targeting many programs. This isn't just a philosophical shift--it's also being driven by visitors' behavior. "Family Art Workshops" suffer from anemic participation whereas multi-generational festivals are overrun with families. Single-speaker lectures languish while lightning talks featuring teen photographers, phD anthropologists, and professional dancers are packed. Programs that emphasize bringing diverse people together are more popular than those that serve intact groups. Why fight it?

And so, while we continue to acknowledge that specific communities have particular assets and needs, we spend more time thinking about how to connect them than how to serve each on its own. We're comfortable being deliberately unhip if it means that a seven year old, a seventeen year old, and a seventy year old all feel "at home" at the museum. This approach allows us to sidestep the question of parallel versus pipeline programming and instead create a new pipeline that is about unexpected connections and social experiences.

Focusing on social bridging also leads to tricky questions as to how we develop new programming, especially when it comes to outreach. When we offer programs at a school or neighborhood festival or community center, we do it to work with the group who live or learn there. Ironically and somewhat depressingly, our partnerships with marginalized communities often involve more segregated work because of our desire to engage in their space, on their terms. There are some groups who we work with terrifically in their own space but who we rarely engage in ours. This leads to good bonding, but very little bridging.

I don't have the answer to how we can incorporate bridging across the various ways we work with intact and blended communities. When it comes to school programs, we are now actively exploring how our approach might shift to emphasize bridging--among students in the same school, among students from different schools, among students across their school and home life. When it comes to working with intact cultural and ethnic communities, one of the resources that is helping me think through these questions is a 2004 paper by Dr. Pia Moriarty on Immigrant Participatory Arts in Silicon Valley. In the paper, Dr. Moriarty puts forward a paradigm of "bonded-bridging" to describe the way that ethnically-identified programs and organizations contribute to bridging in a majority-immigrant community. It's a thoughtful and intriguing paper, and I encourage you to read it.

I'm still chewing on the idea of "bonded-bridging" and the limitations and possibilities of a bridging strategy in a diverse community. But for now, I'm happy that we've been able to address some of our hand-wringing over targeted programs and inclusion with an approach that serves both our visitors and our core goals.

Does social bridging make sense for your institution? How do you reconcile inclusion and targeting in program design?

Guest Post: Radical Collaboration - Tools for Partnering with Community Members

This guest post was written by my incredible colleagues, Stacey Marie Garcia and Emily Hope Dobkin, with minimal input from me. It started as a handout for a session that Stacey and I are doing at the California Association of Museums, and then I realized it was so darn useful that it was worth sharing with all of you. Can't wait to hear what you think.

The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museumof Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations. Each month we work with 50-100 individuals to co-produce our community programs.  It’s not unusual for us to meet with an environmental activist, a balloon artist, a farmer, and the Mayor of Santa Cruz all in one day. Every time we collaborate, we learn new ways to improve our process, organization and communication.

We never received a “how-to-guide” for collaborating with community members here at the MAH, but over time, we have acquired some basic tools that have shaped our approach. We realize collaboration differs greatly for each individual and organization. We offer these tools in the spirit of sharing and look forward to learning about the techniques you use in your own community.

Start with and continuously identify your communities.

• Who are they?
• What are their needs?
• What are their assets?
• Who is represented in your museum? Who isn’t?

One way we do this is through C3 (Creative Community Committee) meetings. C3 is a group of diverse community members that meets to creatively brainstorm new forms of collaboration with community members. C3 topics have ranged from exhibition development, community needs, outreach programs, our Loyalty Lab project, and family programs.

Reach out to and continuously seek diverse collaborators--not just the usual suspects.

We look for partners who have:

• An understanding of and desire to help meet your community’s needs.
• Incredible assets, skills and resources to offer to your community but they are in need of more awareness, promotion, visibility and representation.
• A genuine enthusiasm for sharing their skills, building knowledge and developing relationships in the community even if they haven’t done it before. For example, a few months ago we had a couple approach us to propose a Pop-Up Tea Ceremony.  Their enthusiasm and commitment charmed us and aligned with our social bridging goals. We invited them to set up the day after we met them and they’ve been Friday regulars ever since.
• Experience working with a wide variety of age groups or teaching in general. 
• Good communication skills and are kind and friendly.
• Large and small (or no) followings. When planning programs or events, we involve a combination of these groups to share and bridge audiences, bringing big, diverse crowds to new artists and ideas.

Openly invite collaboration by establishing and maintaining transparency about your partnerships with the public and fellow staff members.

• On your website: share your programing goals, solicit collaborations in general and for specific events, provide easily accessible staff contact information, clearly state how your collaborations function, give thanks and acknowledgement to your collaborators through your website and on Facebook page.
• At your museum: have your front desk staff aware of upcoming events and collaboration possibilities, always have business cards available for visitors interested in collaborating so they can easily contact staff members.  Be available to talk with people at your events and hand out your contact information to anyone who has an idea they’d like to talk with you about or is interested in helping. Follow up with them later.
• Don’t pass judgment or make assumptions. Always be open to discussing collaborative possibilities with anyone and everyone and then decide if it’s a good fit.  
• Mine your colleagues; ask for ideas and suggestions from staff members for resources. You never know who might have connections to some place or another. For our Art That Moves event, our Membership and Development Director suggested the incredibly popular Tarp Surfing activity.

Always meet your collaborators in person. We can’t overstate how important this is to getting everyone moving in the same direction.

• Clearly explain how your organization collaborates with others before you meet.
• Meet them at your museum so they begin to become more familiar and comfortable with the space and understand how they will fit into the event or program.
• Ask them about their goals for this collaboration and share your goals.
• Find a way, together, to achieve both.
• Brainstorm together your wildest ideas and then scale back. For our 3^rd Friday series, we like to have an initial meeting with all of our collaborators and together go over the community program goals tied to the theme of the event. Incredible projects can arise when you have a poet, a librarian, a printmaker, a bookbinder and a teacher all throwing out ideas together. (Radical Craft Night and Poetry & Book Arts)
• Allow time to pass for further individual reflection, for them to share their ideas with other members of their organization and for you to give it further thought.
• Confirm final details with them over phone, email or go to their location this time.

Collaboration is based upon communication. Get ready to talk.

• Be prepared to spend an enormous amount of time communicating with each individual through email, over the phone and in person.
• Make time for them. When you give collaborators more of your time, they will feel more confident about their role in the event, their project/workshop/demonstration will inevitably be stronger and your visitors will be happier.
• When you produce a large event with many individuals, make sure they are all connected through email. This establishes communication across the entire group, collective teamwork, the opportunity to share resources and the possibility of future relationships and connections to develop amongst your collaborators.  Recently, we hosted a PechaKucha night at the MAH, which featured a wide range of community members presenting on eight different topics. These eight people didn't know each other at all before the event. In a pre-event email exchange, one presenter offered up a useful link to help practice giving this kind of talk. That email sparked several messages of appreciation and excitement, creating a sense of comradery.

Even if you can’t financially compensate your collaborators, show your collaborators how much you value them.

Many times, we cannot pay our collaborators. For some MAH events, we collaborate with 120 individuals across the spectrum from amateurs to professionals, all of whom have very different expectations about compensation. How do we pay a group of ukulele players, a teenage rock band and a world-renowned musician fairly and on a very limited budget?

Here are some other ways we compensate our collaborators:

• Give them as much press as possible. Suggest them to press for a feature in the local paper.
• Acknowledge them on your website and always link to their website.
• Pay for all their materials.
• Offer food and drinks for them at the event.
• Give them a guest pass.
• Thank them and credit them for their work and volunteered time.
• Refer them if someone asks you for a recommendation.
• Help them learn from the experience. We recently had a group of students creating balloon art during our Winterpalooza Family Festival. New to the art form and the museum, we gave them a gift certificate to reflect over milkshakes at a local burger joint after the event.
• Encourage them to promote themselves/their organization and offer ways for visitors to learn more about their events at your event. It’s a reciprocal appreciation: we are able to showcase and share the amazing talent in our community, and they’re able to share their work with a larger audience, make new connections in the community and learn from their experiences interacting with the public

Your partners are doing a lot of work. Make it as easy for them as possible.

• Share your resources and connections that can help make their activity/collaboration stronger. A friendly sheet metal company in Santa Cruz provided scrap metal for our Experience Metal festival last summer; we thanked them by donating back the giant robot visitors partly made from the scrap.
• Buy, gather, and prep all the materials you can. This might mean cutting thousands of papers various sizes, wheeling hundreds of library books through downtown, dumpster diving for cardboard boxes and driving up to the mountains to move a 200lb letterpress to the MAH.
• Set up their tables and materials for them before they arrive.
• Have volunteers ready to assist them with set up and break down, as well as coverage during breaks.
• Clearly communicate with them throughout the process, show them exactly where they will be and where everyone else will be, let them know the schedule, where to check in, how and where to find help and assistance and what is expected of them before, during and after the event.

Get collaborators' feedback and give them credit for their contributions.

• Survey your collaborators extensively to find out: ways to improve for next time, what they appreciated, how or if they benefited from the collaboration, and what changes they’d like to see made. Here's a sample collaborator survey from our recent Poetry and Book Arts event.
• Read the surveys and make active and immediate changes based upon their feedback.
• Document the event: Share photographs of the event on social media outlets and always have fully downloadable photographs available for their use.
• Keep in contact with them. These people are now one of your best and most reliable resources and you can be theirs as well. Stay up to date with them about future collaborations or other potential collaborators they may know. Be helpful to them and they will be helpful to you. 

How do you collaborate with your community? What tools and methods have you found beneficial?

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.

How We Doubled Attendance in a Year: One More Post about How Events Changed Our Attendance

I promise--after this post, I'll stop writing about this. But we've just compiled all our attendance data for the past year at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (our fiscal year ends on June 30), and several people have written to me asking for the numbers behind our turnaround. I'm in no way suggesting this is the best or only way to get more people involved in an institution--it's just the way that we did it.

Here is the growth in our attendance, busiest day, and membership from last year to this year. These rose by 115%, 240%, and 30% respectively. The busiest day in both 2011 and 2012 is our longtime community program, Free First Friday.

Now, here's our attendance breakdown for the year that just ended. Of the 37,361 visitors who attended, 63% came for a community program/event.

And finally, and perhaps most interestingly, here's a comparison of Jan-June 2011 vs Jan-June 2012. I'd like to show you the data for the full fiscal year, but we only have this daily data beginning in the winter of 2011. You can see here that 86% of our growth in attendance from 2011 to 2012 is due to community programs.

All of this growth happened with a reduced budget and staff. It happened because we:

• partnered with local artists and community organizations whose passion and generosity made it possible for us to create incredible events. Over 800 people volunteered their talents to support our programs, with the majority collaborating on our monthly themed 3rd Friday events. These include community arts groups, social service agencies, environmental groups, social clubs, and many inspiring individuals whom we can't thank enough. These collaborators brought their own audiences along with their abilities, which introduced a lot of new people to the museum.
• actively sought out community needs to respond to. We tried with every event to meet a clearly-expressed demand or interest in the community. People wanted a fire festival, so we did a fire festival. People love crafting, so we created Radical Craft Night. Sometimes the interests were overt, and sometimes they were something we sensed in the wind. But we tried never to create an event without partners or audiences who were invested in what we were making.
• focused on specific audiences and consistent time slots. We created programming specifically targeted to families with young kids and adults looking for casual, intriguing, affordable cultural experiences on Friday nights and Saturdays. Now Friday nights at the museum have become something people can count on, and they keep growing.
• were shamelessly resourceful. Our program budgets are typically under $100. A big festival with 50 collaborators and 1,000 visitors might rate a $250 budget. We get materials donated from our members, we put up our own flyers around town, and we have a great working relationship with the city dump. Now that we're in a better financial position, we do plan to increase budgets a bit, but we want to spend any additional money supporting our artist collaborators, not on extra materials.

In the coming year, we plan to keep this up, and to:

• diversify our programming by offering more intimate events alongside the big festivals. We have increased to being open late every Friday, but we will continue to only have big events (500+ visitors) on the 1st and 3rd Fridays. The other Fridays will be for more singular workshops, talks, and performances. The same is true for Saturdays, where we will continue to have a monthly formal family art workshop but add in drop-in programming on the other weekends.
• find ways to financially support our program collaborators. We realize that asking people to volunteer their talents is not always respectful of their time or skills. At the same time, our programs' success is based on the cross-pollination of professional and amateur collaborators, all of whom bring different needs and expectations to the table. We're working on providing paying opportunities for collaborators that are equitable and flexible enough to accomodate the diversity of our partnerships.
• design new programs with a focus on history. Many of our events in the past year have fallen more heavily on the art side of the ledger, and as a museum of art AND history, we want to make sure we're reflecting the breadth of Santa Cruz culture. We've been toying with a participatory future-casting program and or a storytelling series to start moving in this direction.
• develop a system for tracking and rewarding repeat participation. Right now, all we do is count people. We know anecdotally that people tend to attend two events and then become a member on their third visit, but we don't REALLY know what's inducing people to come, come back, join, and renew. We're looking for low-cost ways to do this given our small size and community-driven character. More on that soon.

I hope this data is useful to you. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

The Event-Driven Museum, One Year Later

A year ago, I wrote a post speculating about whether events (institutionally-produced programs) might be a primary driver for people to attend museums, with exhibitions being secondary. Now, a year later, I've seen the beginnings of how that question has borne out at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), as well as hearing from folks around the museum industry about the interplay of exhibitions and events at their own institutions.

And so, in this post, a few findings, and more questions.

Many museums, big and small, thrive on events. I had originally assumed that this phenomenon might affect smaller museums in smaller markets more than large urban institutions, but I've since learned from colleagues at big hitters like LACMA and the Dallas Museum of Art that the majority of their visitors attend through events. One director of a children's museum even told me that they "eventize" normal operations--calling a Saturday a "family festival" without changing the planned programming--to draw more people. At our museum, about 68% of casual visitors (non-school tours) attended through events this year.

This isn't true for every museum. There are still many museums in large tourist centers with a hefty one-time audience. Zoos, aquaria, science and children's museums boast a significant "anytime" audience of families who return again and again. But for art and history museums, especially outside the biggest tourism markets, I wouldn't be surprised if events drive the lion's share of attendance, period.

At our small museum, events have driven a huge increase in attendance, community partnerships, and media coverage. We're still crunching numbers for the close of the fiscal year, but our attendance has more than doubled from 17,349 last year to about 36,000 this year. The vast majority of that increase has come through attendance to new events.

These events don't just increase audience. This year, we produced our events--especially the 3rd Friday evening series--in partnership with over 700 artists and community organizations in Santa Cruz. Events enabled us to partner with diverse groups who brought in new audiences and programmatic opportunities. We turned a place where “nothing happens” into a place where something was often happening. We got media attention each time we hosted an event, and within a year, we were celebrated by the local weekly as “a major go-to hotspot… that keeps things fresh and fuels the creative fires of Santa Cruz.”

So why is this happening, and what does it mean? Here are three possibilities I'm toying with for why events are taking center stage at museums:

• Culturally, we are shifting to a more event-driven society. Recreational time is down, people are more scheduled than ever, and “casually” visiting a museum is irrelevant to many people, especially those who live outside large urban cultural centers. Festivals—whether of jazz, visual art, ethnic identity, or historic reenactment—are experiencing record attendance even as more permanent institutions that offer the same content are struggling. People want to come for the weekend, the moment, the event. (Note: this is a hypothesis with little data to back it up. Can you help with some concrete information to confirm or refute this idea?)
• It's less about the event than the timing. Audience behavior could be more driven by museum hours than by the type of activity offered. Events mostly happen in the evening or on weekends, outside of work time. The majority of our exhibition hours do not. Maybe if museums were open from 3-10pm instead of 10am-5pm, the attendance would be higher overall. However, it is worth noting that at the MAH, a Saturday without an event during daytime hours typically draws half as many visitors as a Saturday with even a very low-key drop-in program. 
• Events generate media buzz and attention with greater frequency than exhibitions. The more events we do, the more we get known for events, and the more people attend during them. If society is more event-driven than ever, we have to give people explicit (and frequent) reasons to think of museums as an "anytime" experience, or they never will attend casually. This could be a worthwhile long play that introduces people to the value of a weekly "museum moment," or it could be an uphill battle against the reality of how and why people prefer to engage. 

I'm most interested in the first of these, and I'm genuinely curious to hear about any studies or data that might shed light on the (real or imagined) cultural shift towards events. In talking with executive directors of a range of arts organizations, it really does seem that festivals are performing better than their regularly-scheduled counterparts. I don't know if that has always been the case or whether festival formats are just now in ascendance. What have you seen, both from the arts management side and from your own experience as a consumer?

A Community-Driven Approach to Program Design

How do you develop programs that are responsive to your community in a meaningful way? How do you find out what's important to different communities, and how do you change your plans based on their needs?

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. We wanted to create a structure that would allow us to:

1. internally, clearly articulate our programmatic goals and assess our plans against those goals
2. externally, invite people with diverse backgrounds and connections throughout the County to help us understand their needs and brainstorm creative approaches to fulfilling them
3. sensibly balance the responsibilities and time commitment of staff and community members to the development process

In many ways, #3 was most important to us. After several months of planning massively collaborative programs (a typical monthly event might involve 50 partners), we've realized that the people who are best at helping us come up with ideas are not necessarily the people who are best to help us execute them. There are many amazing community representatives from business, arts, education, and social services who connect us to powerful ideas and partners. We don't want to wear them out on standing meetings or ongoing projects that may not draw on their talents.

So we've started a new committee called C3--the Creative Community Committee. C3 is a large, diverse group that meets bi-monthly/quarterly for a highly specific brainstorming session. C3 invites people to cross-pollinate and share ideas--the most promising of which we will follow up on to plan new programs.

The C3 process is highly indebted to two sources:

• Beck Tench's honeycomb diagram for articulating and assessing program goals (Museum of Life and Science, Durham, NC)
• Michael John Gorman's "Leonardo group"--a large group of diverse, creative individuals that his institution pulls together on a quarterly basis to brainstorm ideas for upcoming projects (Science Gallery, Dublin, Ireland)

C3 had its first meeting last week. It was an evening meeting with beer and chips. We had about thirty participants ranging from MAH trustees to artists, educators to architects, moms to grandfathers. Here are the slides so you can see what we shared. We used Beck Tench's honeycomb format to present the six main goals for MAH community programs against which we'll assess new ideas (quickly--about the first ten minutes after introductions). 

Six goals for MAH community programs.

Then, we went honeycomb-crazy. We asked the whole group to brainstorm communities/constituencies who they thought could make a stronger connection with art, history, and culture. We picked five of those communities and split into small groups. Each small group spent fifteen minutes brainstorming the needs for that community, and then another fifteen discussing potential projects and collaborators that could help meet those needs. In the end, we came back together to share our most promising ideas. The whole meeting took 90 minutes and the majority of the time was spent really working, not sitting and listening.

Moving from community needs out to possible projects/collaborators. 

Here are a few things that I think helped make this experience valuable:

• We started from communities' needs, not the museum's. For example, one of our groups was focused on commuters. They spent the first half of their time not even mentioning the museum--just talking about challenges that commuters face, their exhaustion and stress, and the ways that their work separates them from the community. Once that group shifted to talking about project ideas and ways the museum could connect to this constituency, they were in a whole different mindset, and the suggestions they made reflected how we can meet community needs, not just market to a particular audience.
• We made people write things down constantly. From the very beginning of the session, we told people that we wanted to get as much as we could from them in the time allotted. We gave them a sheet of paper to use to make random notes about ideas they had--and we stopped the meeting a couple times to encourage people to write things down. We also had interns recording during the honeycomb exercise. In the end, we had lots of pieces of paper with ideas tied to specific individuals with whom we can follow up.
• We invited lots of people who didn't know each other. There's useful energy that arises when you put a teacher, a techie, a mom, and an artist in a group and ask them to work together. I think people appreciated getting to meet new people and stretching laterally. We plan to keep adding to the list of who we invite to these meetings to keep things fresh and varied.

What happens next? The real value of these kinds of meetings is in the followup. We deliberately avoided spending too much time sharing specific suggestions so that we can measure the ideas against our program goals and chase the most promising ones. Now the trick is for us to make sure we spend the time to do that assessing and chasing and make it happen.

How Do You Document Your Creative Process?

Recently, my colleagues have gone wild for Pinterest. Pinterest is an online sharing tool that allows you to construct virtual bulletin boards to collect and display images from across the web. While some museums are using the tool in clever public-facing ways, that's not what's happening here at the MAH. At our museum, our programs team is using Pinterest to develop ideas for upcoming community events. As staff members and interns discover intriguing activities, products, or artwork on the web, individuals can "pin" items of interest to the boards for specific events (i.e. Fire Festival) or program types (Family Programs). This is particularly effective for us since interns and volunteers are significant contributors to our programmatic team and everyone is on different schedules. We can collaborate on Pinterest boards asynchronously, comment on what others add to the boards, and plan events based on the aggregated information. We're starting to use it for the early stages of exhibition planning as well.

We're not using Pinterest to do something cool on the Web. We're using it to solve a basic internal communication problem. I used to constantly email links to individual staff members with a message like "we should try this." Pinterest replaces those emails by sharing that content a more broadly usable, indexable way. It aggregates design inspiration in a central place we all can share.

And that central place happens to be public. Pinterest allows us--requires us, really--to document a part of our creative process openly on the web. As social web tools become more mainstream and privacy concerns lessen (somewhat), I'm seeing more and more organizations use them in informal ways. Project coordination on wikis. Loosely formatted blogs to document progress. There's no extra effort involved to upload or create something special for public consumption. It's just part of the work itself.

What that means, potentially, is a lot more capacity to share the HOW behind our work, not just the end result. It's hard to learn from colleagues when everything is completed and spit-polished into a case study or conference session. I learn a lot more from the messy center of projects--when you know enough to have some goals and direction, but you're still muddling with what the final result will be. At least for me, that's when the juiciest part of the creative process happens.

At first, it felt a little odd to have people outside our own organization "follow" some of the Pinterest boards we thought we were using for internal purposes only. But then I realized we were functionally granting the world access to our brainstorming. I suspect as a professional I can learn a lot more from my colleagues if I can tap into and observe these kinds of internal conversations as projects are proceeding. And for students who mostly experience completed projects through packaged case studies, this kind of access may increase understanding about how the sausage is made.

I'm curious how other organizations are publicly documenting and sharing creative process. I think of this as fundamentally different from creating something packaged to share on the Web for comment. What tools are you using that naturally invite others to follow along? What messy creative bits are you sharing--intentionally or unintentionally?

Yes, Visitors Can Help You. But You Have to Let Them.

Two weeks ago, two of my staff members came to me with a problem. They were planning a wall mural for our classroom. They planned to paint the outline of Santa Cruz County, print out photos of a series of important landmarks or icons throughout the county, and then paint those items onto the map. As part of our monthly First Friday community event, they would invite visitors to draw some of the icons, and then the drawings would be the basis for what would be painted on the mural.

The problem? It was Friday, a few hours before the drawing activity, and my colleagues were worried that it would be too challenging for people to draw the icons and landmarks selected. They were afraid that visitors would get frustrated or that the quality of their work would not be good enough to translate to the mural. We often avoid drawing as a community art activity because visitors can get really judgmental of their own abilities, and our staff just felt that this might be too hard.  They wanted to drop the activity.

I asked what plan B was if visitors didn't draw the items. They said that they would draw them or translate them from photographs in some way. These are both busy people, and while they are very artistic, neither is a crack drawer.

I encouraged them to go ahead with the community activity as planned. It seemed to me like we had little to lose and a lot to gain if visitors could in fact make some good representations of the icons. I figured this was a classic crowd-sourcing activity; while not everyone can draw well, it seemed a heck of a lot more likely that we'd get some good drawings from a few of the 800+ people at the event than we'd get if we never asked.

Visitors rose to the challenge and made some incredible drawings. It turned into a pretty wild evening in the classroom, filled with, "Whoa! You drew that?!"s, visitors pouring over each other's work, and impossible decisions about which drawings would be used for the final mural. We were all surprised by the quality of the visitors' work. We selected final drawings for the mural based on drawings by young kids, teenagers, and adults. This Friday, a new set of visitors will paint the drawn icons onto the actual mural.

This experience reminded me of how much confidence it takes to say yes to any new activities (this isn't limited to participatory projects) because of unfamiliarity with the process. My colleagues are smart, generous people who love involving visitors in our work. But when the work gets complicated or difficult, it's easy to get nervous about visitors' ability to perform.

A participatory project is one in which visitors/users can actively contribute to make the institution better. That's only possible if we let them try. We're probably all self-censoring opportunities for community members to make significant contributions to our work. How could visitors improve your institution, and what do you need to let go of to help them do it?