Creating an Evaluation Toolkit for a Community-Based School Program at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Program Strategy and Evaluation
Written By Cathy Sigmond

Client: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | Location: San Francisco, CA

 
 

We developed a toolkit to support the ongoing expansion of the Equity School Partnership Program, a multi-visit school visits program designed to offer arts based, culturally responsive content for students in the Bay area. 

OVERVIEW

In 2024, we partnered with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) to evaluate the Equity School Partnership Program (ESPP). ESPP was developed to provide a culturally responsive, multi-visit alternative to FAMSF’s single visit program. ESPP had already been piloted in several classrooms and FAMSF felt they were ready to establish standardized evaluation procedures to ensure the program was fulfilling its collaborative and individualized approach while also scaling to serve more students.

APPROACH

We designed an evaluation during 2024-2025 with the following components: 

  • Discovery Phase: We began with a discovery to gather information needed to develop a Logic Model for ESPP. During this stage, we facilitated a series of conversations with FAMSF program staff, participating teachers, and community artists who teach the program to understand the goals and intended outcomes of ESPP and served to shape the rest of the study design. 

  • One-on-One Conversations: We created an interview guide informed by the Discovery Phase conversations to facilitate reflective conversations with community artists and teachers who participated in ESPP.

  • Evaluation Toolkit: Guided by the Logic Model and interview findings, we developed several evaluation tools for ongoing program refinement, including a standardized post-program survey, observation guide for teachers, and a question bank for FAMSF staff to use to interview artists and teachers following the end of the residency.

  • Evaluation Capacity Building Workshop: We also provided a training workshop designed to foster FAMSF staff’s capacity for ongoing evaluation with the tools we developed.

CLIENT TAKEAWAYS

Discovery Phase conversations revealed that participating teachers, artists, and students learned a lot from FAMSF staff; teachers and artists particularly appreciated the customized approach, which they felt supported their students in feeling confident and proud of their community and individual identities. These ideas informed our Logic Model, which played an important role in determining the direction for ongoing conversations with artists and teachers to refine the Toolkit evaluation and reflection tools.

The Toolkit not only provides tools for ongoing evaluation capacity building, but also offers our recommendations for key elements of ESPP to preserve when considering next steps around scaling the program. These include its cultural responsivity, focus on students’ interests, and collaborative planning between artists and teachers. Moving forward FAMSF staff will steward the program by carefully considering budget and time allocations needed to support productive collaboration.

Download the Toolkit
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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Evaluating Multiple Audience Outcomes of a School Visit Program at a University Art Museum