Activating HistoryMiami Museum’s Statement of Purpose to Center Audiences

Audience Impact Strategy
Written By Cathy Sigmond

Client: HistoryMiami Museum | Location: Miami, FL

 
 

We collaborated with HistoryMiami Museum to activate and align their actions with their Statement of Purpose, empowering them to put their audience at the center of their work.

OVERVIEW

HistoryMiami reached out to us in the spring of 2024 seeking assistance in operationalizing their newly developed Statement of Purpose, which re-envisioned the future of the organization. They were focused on ensuring that staff across all departments effectively aligned their day-to-day work with the vision outlined in the Statement of Purpose.

To help HistoryMiami operationalize and activate the Statement of Purpose, we facilitated conversations and working sessions with all staff that led to the creation of a suite of customized tools, ensuring their meaningful integration into all decision-making processes. This effort culminated in the development of a Guide to Audience Impact, an audience-focused resource for the tools and processes.

APPROACH

Using Audience Impact Strategy—a five-step process—we guided HistoryMiami staff in uniting around and actualizing their Statement of Purpose to keep their audience at the forefront of their work. The steps included:

  1. Clarify Purpose: We led conversations with departmental teams to analyze the Statement of Purpose, which encompassed a vision statement, core messages, and target audiences. Through in-depth discussions, we identified common understandings and created measurable audience outcomes. We prepared a report summarizing our findings.

  2. Prioritize Audiences: While the Statement of Purpose included a list of target audiences, there was a need to better understand them, their motivations and how to engage them meaningfully. We facilitated conversations to define these audiences more clearly—beyond demographics—and explored their significance to HistoryMiami. This process resulted in a refined and more impactful list of target audiences.

  3. Create a Guide to Audience Impact: Building on our discussions, we facilitated working sessions with staff to develop the Guide to Audience Impact featuring three essential tools: a decision tool, audience composites, and an evaluation plan with a question bank. We worked iteratively to develop the tools, gathering staff feedback through surveys after the sessions.

  4. Activate for Impact: We led three practice sessions. In each practice session, staff participated in exercises that required them to  use the tools. This gave them the opportunity to ask us questions and learn with each other.

  5. Sustain Momentum: We left HistoryMiami feeling empowered to start using the finalized Guide to Audience Impact, starting with using it to inform decisions at their upcoming annual Senior Leadership retreat.

CLIENT TAKEAWAYS

By involving all staff in the Audience Impact Strategy process, we ensured that their voices and perspectives were heard, leading to a consensus around the Statement of Purpose. This collaborative approach not only fostered a shared understanding of the Statement of Purpose but also empowered staff to confidently see a clear connection between it, their actions and the impact on audiences. By clarifying the Statement of Purpose, HistoryMiami can now move forward with a unified plan that enhances their decision-making processes, ensuring that the museum's vision for its audiences resonates throughout all levels of the organization.

Cathy Sigmond

Cathy brings many years of experience in education and experience design to her role as Head of Strategy at Kera Collective. 

Having previously worked in a variety of educational settings, Cathy is driven by her constant fascination and delight at how people make discoveries about the familiar and the unfamiliar. 

Cathy loves helping to shape experiences that spark curiosity and make a difference in people’s lives. She particularly enjoys the rapid, iterative nature of design-based research and the deep insights that come from qualitative research, especially on projects exploring interactions with the digital and built environments. 

Cathy shares her passion for experience design research widely and regularly guest lectures for graduate programs, including the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Exhibition and Experience Design Program and the Pratt Institute’s School of Information. Cathy served as the co-chair of the Museum Computer Network’s Human-Centered Design special interest group from 2018-2021.

Outside of work, you can usually find Cathy playing soccer, thrifting, or making her way through her large cookbook collection. 

Cathy’s favorite museum experiences are immersive; she will always vividly remember walking through the giant heart at the Franklin Institute, being surrounded by birds at the Peabody Essex Museum, and hearing centuries-old instruments come to life at the Museum of Musical Instruments. 

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