Developing a Cross-Departmental Evaluation Strategy for the Creative Discovery Museum
Client: Creative Discovery Museum | Location: Chattanooga, TN | Funding: Institute for Museum and Library Services
Through a long term partnership, we’ve helped the Creative Discovery Museum unite its staff members around a common vision of audience impact.
OVERVIEW
Since 2017, we’ve partnered with the Creative Discovery Museum as their evaluation coach and advisor. Our initial relationship began with an impact-driven approach to evaluation capacity building in 2017.
The partnership began when CDM recognized the need to unite their staff and departments around a common vision for audience impact. Further, while they believed in evaluation, they knew they needed to professionalize their evaluation processes.
APPROACH
Our original capacity building project consisted of a series of workshops and implementing a comprehensive evaluation plan. Through this work, we facilitated exercises with the museum’s staff to help them develop a shared vision for impact and measurable outcomes for school programs and exhibits. This process involved:
Training museum staff in best practices in conducting evaluation;
Coached them through the evaluation of three programs; and finally,
Leading a session to help staff reflect on the evaluation results and capacity building process
Today, we continue to serve the museum as an ad hoc advisor and evaluation partner.
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
Through our capacity building work, the museum’s staff experienced organizational and individual growth, including expanding their awareness of and comfort with evaluation, increased collaboration between departments, improved processes for analyzing data, and the creation of a shared evaluation database.
Staff also recognized limitations to their growth, such as the time and resources necessary to build evaluation capacity and the commitment required to reflect on and apply evaluation findings. Since our initial work together began, they have remained committed to evaluation, maintaining a part-time evaluator on staff and checking in with us at critical times in their growth and decision-making.
