As someone who joined the museum evaluation field relatively recently, there was a lot to learn about evaluative methods as they relate to museums and cultural institutions. Over the years, Kera Collective has published so much insight detailing how we approach our work, so let’s recap some of our favorite resources on our Learning Hub about evaluation methods!

Impact is the positive difference something (like a museum) makes in people’s lives. It’s how people’s lives are somehow better because of an experience, interaction, or intervention.  

I most often hear impact referenced in the museum field in terms of measurement. Questions like these are common:

• How can we measure our museum’s impact? 

• How can we demonstrate our impact? 

Implicit in these questions is the assumption that impact is happening, and that the real puzzle is in figuring out how to prove it to others. 

But, what makes you so sure impact is happening? And what do you mean by impact in the first place?

We value lifelong learning, and we are grateful for everyone who shares their wisdom with us, helping us to grow and get better at what we do. This month, we’re sharing some of that wisdom with you, including reflections on relational reciprocity, museum AI policies, and effective report writing.

Recently, for a Kera Collective coffee break, where we talk about relevant research and news, we read this thoughtful post by Sarah Jencks on AAM’s blog about why museums need a civic strategy. It made me think about some resulting general questions: can a museum meaningfully engage in civics? What does it mean for a museum to have a civic strategy? And how can engaging in civics create a reputation of trust for museums when thinking about community work? These are seemingly simple questions, but I believe that museums as institutions have to think deeply about their standing before attempting to incorporate civic engagement.

For one of our recent Coffee Breaks, a bi-weekly team meeting where we discuss cultural institution-related news or research, I led a conversation about preserving digital content, inspired by the recent deletion of federal website pages and the Internet Archive’s initiative to preserve them. It’s something I’m passionate about!

We finally gave our newsletter a name—one that reflects our vision and values. Meaning making is at the heart of our work. It’s what happens in museums, and it's what we do every day at Kera Collective. This is a space where we share what we are curious about and what we’re making sense of, together and as individuals.

This is The Meaning Maker.

I am an obsessive podcaster, never missing an episode of Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam or Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell. I recently found a new addition to my queue (via a Revisionist History cross-post): No Small Endeavor. All three podcasts share many of the same guests and same topics of discussion. But, I was particularly interested in how Lee C. Camp—the host of No Small Endeavor—approaches the podcast from his perspective as a professor of theology and ethics. The goal of the No Small Endeavor podcast is to explore what it means to live a good life. Therefore, I was intrigued with how often he returns to the topic of attention, finding it worthy of my (ahem) attention.

Toward the end of last year, our fearless leader, Stephanie Downey, wrote about why you need a logic model. Because we often help clients build logic models for programs and partnerships, I want to expand on the why by discussing more about the how and share some tips for creating a logic model that works for you and your organization.

Information is powerful. That is clearer than ever. What we do—or don’t do—with it shapes how we make sense of the world. Our staff picks this month show what happens when information is erased, challenges our assumptions, and emboldens us to innovate.