Clarifying the Intended Impact of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ Nature Research Center
Client: North Carolina Museum of Natural Science | Location: Raleigh, NC | Funding: Institute of Museum and Library Services
We worked with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences to clarify the intended impact of its Nature Research Center and evaluated its impact on middle schoolers and adult learners.
OVERVIEW
The Nature Research Center was a new wing added to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in 2012, created with the intention of connecting visitors with the tools, techniques, and real-life scientists that study the past, present, and future of our planet. We worked with staff to articulate the unique goals of the Nature Research Center and how that fit into the broader museum experience, and evaluated the extent to which visitors were achieving the museum’s intended outcomes.
APPROACH
Through a series of cross-departmental workshops, we developed an Impact Framework to focus staff on achieving impact on audiences through a clearly articulated impact statement and outcomes.
The Impact Framework served as the guidepost for evaluating the extent to which the Nature Research Center supported its middle school and adult learners in making science and scientists more interesting and accessible and helping visitors connect the relevance of science to their daily lives.
We combined focused observations of visitors with in-depth interviews to understand the impact of the museum experience, and particularly interactions with scientists working in the museum, on middle school and adult learners.
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
Overall, we found that each exhibit and program element presented both successes and barriers to achieving the outcomes prioritized in the Impact Framework. For example, interview data suggested many positive experiences related to comfort, accessibility, and excitement about science and scientists. However, we also found that visitors needed more support to make a deeper connection to why science and scientific research is important and how it affects them, another important intended outcome.
The Nature Research Center has actively used the target audiences and outcomes we articulated in the Impact Framework to support focused, consistent messaging that supports intended outcomes across the entire institution. For example, staff are using the Impact Framework when conceiving, discussing, and building new exhibits and programs. Significantly, staff discussions of “consistent messaging” have led, in part, to rewriting the Museum’s mission statement to be more action- and conservation-oriented.
