Why Evaluation

Evaluation is rising as a mainstay of museum work—it helps communicate impact, validate commitment of resources, inform decisions, and improve operations. There are myriad reasons why a museum engages in evaluation. For many museum practitioners, starting the evaluation process and knowing who to work with is a daunting task. Some museums have supported internal evaluation teams, typically situated in Marketing or Education departments. However, this is not the norm, particularly given the upheaval to museum staffing over the past year. But the demand, and need, for evaluation is still ever present. This naturally leads to museums looking for someone, an external evaluator, to come to the rescue.

Whether you have the internal staffing resources or not, working with an external evaluator has other benefits for you and your museum. External evaluators bring in an unbiased perspective to your work. They bring in evaluation expertise and experience that most museum staff would not otherwise have. This includes bringing insights from work at other museums. So where does a museum professional begin? What should you consider when seeking and working with an external evaluator? The following best practices will set you up for success before, during, and after engaging with an external evaluator.

Best Practices

Tip #1: Open, realistic communication is key to finding the right evaluator for your museum and project.

The process for identifying the best evaluator for your needs can be as informal or formal as you like—you might solicit recommendations from colleagues at other museums, search consultant listings on museum networking sites, or write and share a RFP. Crafting an RFP requires that you have a pretty clear idea of why you want or need to carry out an evaluation, what you hope to learn, and how you plan to apply this learning. If you aren’t entirely sure about any or all of these things you may want to begin the process by having conversations with potential evaluation consultants and then asking that they submit a proposal outlining how they would approach the project.

In addition to being transparent about your familiarity with evaluation, be open about your museum’s available resources. In most cases an evaluator can scope and scale a plan that hits your outcomes and works within your budget and timeframe. Sharing this info from the start is helpful as they develop a proposal and sets the stage for open communication moving forward.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that a good proposal is different from a work plan. An experienced evaluator will anticipate the inevitable need to adjust the plan as the project progresses. Their proposal should account for this need for flexibility as they learn more about the project and begin work in earnest.

Tip #2: Be intentional about the type of relationship you want to have with your evaluator.

When working with an external evaluator, consider why you are bringing them on board and what you hope to gain from them. This ultimately helps define the relationship you want to have with the evaluator and vice versa. Evaluators may take on more of a “service-oriented” relationship where they are focused on completing tasks and deliverables as defined in the scope of work. However, evaluators may also take on more of a partner approach, coming to the process as a guide and coach. For museums interested in developing their evaluation capacity, this partnership approach may be a better fit. In the partnership approach, the external evaluator models for you how to carry out an evaluation and works hand in hand with staff to support the process. Rather than staff being on the receiving end of the final product, staff are an integral part of the overall evaluation project. Both approaches can produce rich results for utilization in the museum, but the nature of the relationship and subsequently how the work is carried out will differ.

Tip #3: Expect to invest time at the start of your project getting to know one another.

Often the first step in your collaboration will involve an information review or “data dump” where you share background information about your organization and the project with your evaluator so they can familiarize themselves with your history, culture, and mission. Provide any materials you think will be helpful or informative—they can pick and choose what they feel is most relevant.

And, if you haven’t already, you’ll want to invite your evaluator for a site visit so they can tour your facility and meet with key project staff. This first meeting serves as an opportunity to personalize your working relationship—connect names with faces, creates space to discuss process and outcomes, and serves as the starting point for co-creating a more specific, dates and deliverables-oriented work plan that will guide your work together in the weeks and months ahead.

Tip #4: Have realistic expectations about the evaluation process.

The project launch meeting is also a great opportunity to sit down and establish the parameters of your working relationship, namely establishing basic protocols and understandings about how you and your staff and the evaluator will communicate and work together to hit project milestones. Key points to consider include setting a meeting schedule, deciding what tools to use for sharing information (email, Slack, GoogleDocs, etc.), and identifying staff contacts. Be honest about your availability and realistic how decisions will get made, who gets to make them, and how quickly.

Tip #5: Expect the unexpected.

Have you ever once had a project go exactly as planned? Exactly. There are many variables involved in evaluation—some can be controlled and most cannot. This is where all that effort you invested on the front end finding an evaluator who can work well with your team, establishing collaboration norms, and generally getting to know one another pays off. The work plan you created together is an invaluable tool in moving your project forward and keeping you focused on big picture goals when you need to make adjustments along the way.

Tip #6: Don’t leave the data hanging! Close out the evaluation process and focus on use of findings.

All too often people think the work stops when the data is collected. However, this does a disservice to the goal of evaluation—to improve practice, inform decisions, and communicate impact. To accomplish these goals, you must close out the evaluation process which includes engaging others in interpreting the data (a.k.a. making meaning) and discussing implications. Be sure to work with your evaluator to identify the best ways to engage stakeholders in this process.

One example of a participatory way of engaging staff in meaning making is to have a data party. Data parties involve staff in analyzing the data and interpreting the results. This helps familiarize staff with the data, brings in diverse perspectives on potential implications, and gains buy-in for eventual utilization of the findings. Museums could also take a more informal approach and simply find a time to meet and reflect on the findings of the evaluation and discuss next steps. The key is to be intentional about closing out the process and identifying how the work will be used. The external evaluator can provide guiding questions and recommendations for this meaning making conversation.

Concluding Thoughts

These best practices are some of the important aspects of working with an external evaluator from our perspective. There are certainly a number of other factors to consider and each evaluation project is unique. Talk to other museum professionals about their evaluation experiences and recommendations for who to work with. Peer museum recommendations can be a great starting point for finding just the right external evaluator to work with. Additionally, we’ve included a list of useful resources below that you can explore to learn more about evaluation in informal learning settings as you begin your own evaluation journey.

We hope you find these best practices useful and encouraging for you and your museum as you contemplate finding an external evaluator. For more specific examples of how these best practices look in action, we encourage you to reach out to us at joy@informeval.com or enevins@seed-ed.com.

Resources

AAM Committee on Audience Research and Evaluation (CARE)

Visitor Studies Association and Visitor Studies Journal

Empowering Museum Educators to Evaluate, Journal of Museum Education

Photo by Leon on Unsplash