How defining and measuring social impact changed our museum.
Notes on our journey from my position as Executive Director of the Oakland Museum of California.
Since I wrote this article a few months ago, the world has turned upside down with the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis. We actually held off in publishing this article for a few weeks since it seemed so discordant with the current moment. After all, what does social cohesion mean during a time of social distancing? We’ve begun to realize, however, that this moment is part of our journey. We are now charged with exploring what creating trust, connection and understanding between people and communities means in this transformed context. We are just beginning to investigate this challenge, but I believe the same principles that held true in our journey to date will remain valid and necessary. We will continue to learn, to experiment, to measure and to utilize data, knowing that service to the well-being of our community is more important than ever before.
Fourteen years ago, I became the Executive Director at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), and in that time I’ve seen some pretty significant shifts in our own organization and the museum field at large. One of the most vital shifts influencing OMCA’s future is our journey toward articulating and measuring the social impact of our museum on our visitors. At OMCA, we create the space and context for greater connection, trust, and understanding between people and social groups, leading to greater social cohesion in our community.
You can read more from my OMCA colleagues about our work in this journey (identifying the role social impact should play at the museum here, defining our social impact around social cohesion here, and measuring our social impact here, but I want to take the 30,000 foot view and speak to what that change has felt like as an Executive Director.
Our case for OMCA’s value has never been easier
Ten years ago, we knew very little about our visitors at OMCA. We had ticket sales data, of course, but almost no understanding of the composition of our audience, their age, ethnicity, income, or education level. We had no way of knowing whether or not they were satisfied with their experience at OMCA, or whether their visit had any kind of impact on them at all, other than the type of anecdotal feedback that is difficult to base decisions around. That lack of knowledge made it hard to have productive discussions internally with staff about how to shape and evaluate our work, and even harder to have meaningful conversations with our external stakeholders about who OMCA was serving or how well.
One essential change in my role as Director and CEO of OMCA is how much easier it is becoming to articulate what we do, why we do it, and who we do it for once we began measuring our audience and our social impact. Now I can have rich and interesting conversations with a wide array of stakeholders, everyone from the City Council and Mayor to donors, grantmakers, the press, and our own staff and Board.
I have seen an absolute sea change across all of these stakeholders in their perception of OMCA, and our value to the community in the past decade. Making our case to all sorts of audiences becomes abundantly easier when I can say that more than half of our audience are people of color who reflect our neighborhood demographics, that we have 70% repeat visitors (meaning that we are a place that people return to again and again), that 90% of visitors live within 50 miles of OMCA, and that nearly 60% of visitors strongly agree that they feel welcome at OMCA and appreciate that we tell stories from different communities.
The data that we can use to describe our work has begun making a real impression in particular on our funders.
Funders are as excited to hear about how we’re measuring our social impact as they are to understand what our social impact is in the Oakland community. It’s been interesting and enlightening to hear individual and institutional funders place a real emphasis on identifying arts organizations who are making a measurable difference in their community, focusing on equity, diversity, and inclusion, and trying to do trailblazing work in the area of measuring social impact.
We are currently celebrating our 50th anniversary at OMCA, and our social impact data is playing an important role in our press relations and how we communicate about OMCA as part of our comprehensive fundraising campaign. To be clear, the intricacies of our theory of change or the methodology we’re using to capture and analyze social impact data is too “inside baseball” for most people. For us, it’s more about having the data on hand to help tell the story about how visitors feel a sense of welcome and belonging at OMCA, see their stories reflected, and express interest in understanding the stories of others. I personally feel more confident having these conversations knowing we have the data to back up our message, even if the specific data points never come up in conversation.
Invariably, people do perk up and pay a little more attention when they learn we’re actually rigorously measuring these attributes. Part of the power of this work has been showing we have the data as well as the compelling individual stories, and we have the tools to communicate about our work in new ways.
We’re becoming a magnet for those who share our values
Another notable change I’ve seen in the past few years is how OMCA is becoming a magnet for the type of job candidates who want to do this type of social impact work. We no longer have to try to make the case to new potential staff members that are skeptical, or in outright disagreement, about the role of OMCA in the Oakland community. Now, people not only know what they’re signing up for, they’re seeking us out because of it. I often read cover letters of job candidates articulating how our values and their values are truly aligned around community engagement and social impact.
More than ever before, museums are now engaged in discussions of social justice, often fueled by the powerful activist interests of a multi-generational staff. And, sometimes phrases like “social justice” and “social impact” get used interchangeably. But what does it mean to be a social justice museum, or a museum committed to social impact? The less clear your terminology, the more difficult it will be to ensure everyone on staff shares those same values and practices, and it will be near impossible to measure (in a meaningful way) what you can’t specifically define.
For OMCA, we are committed to the principles of social justice for our staff, our visitors, and our community. But that doesn’t mean that all of our programming has to be framed solely through a social justice lens or that we will only show artists whose expression or content is specifically focused on to social justice issues. Some of our exhibits will have social justice threads running through them, some will be explicitly interrogating a social justice issue, and all of them will try to live up to social justice practices in their creation. We do believe, as many in the museum world do, that museums are not neutral. Neither are the artists, nor the curators. Every choice we make as an institution is putting our values on display.
The data is helping us focus our efforts
For OMCA, it’s also not about messaging a rosy story. We’re trying to be very balanced about saying we have some good news in the early results which are very heartening, but there are also areas where we’re not as strong as we’d like to be, and there are some audiences for whom OMCA isn’t having as much of an impact as we would like. The data that points out where we have more work to do is the most valuable thing that has come from this initiative to measure our social impact, because it helps give us focus.
After this initial year of measurement, we know that we need to focus even more on the experience of OMCA for audiences of color and low-income audiences. And we’re starting to tease apart which elements of our programming, venue, and customer experience could make the biggest difference in improving the experience of those particular audiences. This is an ongoing effort, and we’re constantly learning how to evolve our approach to measuring and using this data.
Looking toward the next decade of social impact measurement
Our measurement of social impact was not intended to be a one-off study, but rather an ongoing commitment to measure, assess and improve over time. I don’t think we’ll ever come to a moment of stasis where we’ve figured out everything about social impact. Surely our understanding about what it means for our museum and our community, how best to measure it, and how best to make decisions informed by that data, will evolve over the next decade just as they have over the past decade. There are four areas where I’m personally inspired to explore our work further and deeper.
1. Searching for new insights with social impact data
One of our most immediate challenges will be uncovering the next level deeper of data collection and how best to glean insights from that data. We’ve come so far in this journey, but we don’t want to become complacent with our current understanding of the situation. When 90% of our audience says they feel welcome and a sense of belonging at OMCA, how do we then continue to widen our circle of understanding to figure out who’s not even making it through our front doors to begin with (and why), or whether our museum visitors carry their experience back to their community, potentially impacting a wider segment of our community that we realize? This is the exciting part for me, to see how far we’ve come and set our sights on that next level of deeper and broader impact.
2. Communicating even more effectively
We’re still teasing apart things like the differences between community engagement and social impact. Right now, we’re thinking about community engagement as the how, and social impact as the result, but the two are certainly intertwined. It’s hard enough for those of us living the work day-to-day to understand all of the nuances and develop the right language, but it takes an even more sustained effort to help our Board and other stakeholders understand that social impact isn’t a new tagline or spin on what we’ve long been doing. It’s a fundamental shift in how we approach how we’re going to evaluate our work, and that evaluation will, in turn, shift how we work, what we work on, who we work with, and so on. We need to make this simple and a North Star that’s easy to follow, without being reductive or flip.
3. Using data to inform our communications
At the same time that we’re thinking about how to communicate explicitly about our social impact measurement work, we’re also thinking about how our understanding of social impact should influence all of our marketing and communications efforts across OMCA. Exhibitions will always be a major tentpole of our marketing efforts, but to come to OMCA is clearly about so much more than the exhibits.
We’re a community gathering space, a garden, a cafe, a workshop, a power station, a dance hall, and so much more.
That same principle extends to our fundraising as well. There are donors we know are committed to the health and wellbeing of communities, but have never considered the arts as part of their potential funding portfolios. How do we change the language and imagery we use across everything from our advertising to our website to our grant proposals to reflect that new reality?
4. Holding ourselves accountable and letting ourselves off the hook
We try really hard to have all of our major decisions be a shared responsibility of our staff and leadership team. It’s not a curator’s exhibit, the education department’s workshop, or the membership team’s pricing change; instead, it’s a decision that everyone had an opportunity to weigh in on and eventually we collectively decided it was the right approach. We try to share in the successes and failures as a team, with everyone learning together.
We take the data seriously, and we take our responsibility to the city of Oakland seriously. As I mentioned, we’re a magnet for folks who deeply care about social impact, social justice, and community engagement. So when the data shows that an initiative is underperforming, we worry about how staff might take that news personally. We know that people who are committed to these ideas and to their value in the community understand the stakes of our work and can feel like they need to shoulder (too much of) the responsibility.
We’ve certainly had times in the past where we’ve held on a little too long to a program or an approach that the data showed wasn’t working, because it just felt good to do that thing. Now, we’re looking for more ways to stay true to what the data is showing us, celebrating “failure” as an opportunity for learning, and supporting the emotional wellbeing of staff throughout the learning process.
Social impact is not a “one size fits all” solution
We’re thrilled to see the growing interest in social impact measurement across the museum field, and the broader arts field. We’re also a little nervous about the risk that social impact becomes a flavor of the month for some institutions, or, because their understanding of it (or commitment to it) is relatively surface-level, the reputation of social impact gets damaged in the eyes of funders or other stakeholders.
It took OMCA nearly a decade of deep reflection, countless conversations among the staff and board, and the undertaking of a fair bit of research into the needs of our community, to really grapple with what we believed our distinctive civic contribution could be within the city of Oakland. When we finally landed on the concept of social cohesion, it was only because of our specific mission, the history of our institution, the challenges our community faces, the unique demographic composition of our community, and the resources and assets we happen to have access to at this moment in time that made it possible for us to move forward with this work here at OMCA.
In other words, if you somehow airlifted the entire OMCA footprint and plopped it down in another community, there’s no telling where we might land on what kind of social impact we believed the museum could have within that community. And if that fantastical turn of events did happen, I think we would still need to start nearly from scratch in building the right staff and board, with the right capacity to engage with that new community.
We’re eager to share our learnings about social cohesion, and how we’re measuring it at OMCA, but I also want to encourage my colleagues across the field to put the time and energy into exploring what unique problem your institution is trying to solve in your specific community. You can learn more about the process we used to discover ours in this great article from Johanna Jones, our Associate Director of Visitor Evaluation and Insights. Americans for the Arts also released their “Arts and Social Impact Explorer Wheel” that might get the wheels turning in your head about how arts organizations are contributing to health and wellness, lifelong learning outcomes, social justice issues, environmental sustainability, economic development, and so much more.
Regardless of where you land, if your organization is somewhere along the journey towards measuring social impact, I have three pieces of advice based on what we’ve learned over the past decade.
1. Leadership and Board buy-in are critical
It’s hard to make a significant change at an institution, no matter what the specific change is, without leadership at the top level fully behind the idea. Resources will flow to their priorities. Difficult conversations will be made easier when you know they have your back. Change will happen at a deeper, more fundamental level across the organization, when they believe this is the right approach in their gut. If the CEO or Executive Director is being evaluated by the Board based on the social impact their organization is having within the community, you can bet that leadership will be consistently driving the conversation forward, and everyone at the institution will feel like they need to pay attention to it. But by no means does it only take buy-in at the leadership level.
Gearing the decisions of the entire institution around optimizing for social impact takes a big idea and infinite small changes happening in every nook and cranny of the organization.
The leadership also needs to take the data as it’s coming in to make strategic decisions. Investing more in one type of audience, program, or initiative often means investing less in something else. Those are going to be tough decisions, but we’re certainly seeing those choices pay off for OMCA.
If you happen to find yourself as a front-line worker or mid-level manager in an organization that isn’t interested in framing its work around social impact, you can often still experiment in your own corner of the organization. Look for opportunities in the education department or even in the store; appeal to leadership to start pilot programs or labs; take the initiative to find funders who are supporting and pushing for this type of work.
2. Invest in research and capacity building
In order to even think about trying to solve a problem in your community, I believe you need to deeply understand that community and their needs and context. The level of investment in exploratory research that is human-centered and specific to your community, particularly to people who may not be visiting your museum yet, can be extraordinary and time consuming. But it is absolutely critical. And there will be so many areas of capacity building that need to happen along the way and in parallel. The capacity to talk openly and fluently about race is not an inherent trait most people possess. Understanding complex and nuanced data is not a traditional skill set of arts leaders. Changing deepset organizational culture and behaviors will take more time and patience than you expect.
One of the key first steps is hearing more from visitors, particularly in a structured, sustained, and meaningful way.
As you start to engage more visitors in conversations, understanding who they are often needs to go beyond capturing the kind of high-level demographic data points that a census might cover. Understanding how they feel will go beyond capturing satisfaction scores. As the data starts to accumulate, there are more and more systems you need in place to store it, analyze it, and communicate about it.
The good news is, you can start small. Make the data gathering and evaluation the responsibility of a single staff member’s role, even if it’s just part of their role. Most organizations of a substantial size might eventually need one or more full-time people dedicated to data and evaluation. But in the meantime, a great resource for gathering audience data on a very low budget comes from the Of/By/For all team, “Who’s Coming? Respectful Audience Surveying Toolkit.”
3. Commit to using the data
We’re conditioned in the nonprofit world to frame our data around success stories for the Board, for funders, and for our community because we’re dependent on all of them for our funding and our very existence. Of course everything’s great, our finances are on track, that new program is out-performing all of our goals, and all of our audiences are just thrilled with our work. But the reality is often a much trickier story to tell. When we flip the definition of a museum to no longer be the building where objects are stored and exhibited, but instead to have a fundamental impact within our community, we must use all of the data at our disposal to measure and improve our impact. We need to surface the success stories, but also the areas where we’re struggling to meet the needs of our community.
At OMCA, we’ve set up lots of different ways for this data to be shared across the organization, so that everyone can use what we know about our community to inform their work. One of the keys to our success has been having a senior-level manager, Johanna Jones, in a data role who’s respected and trusted by other senior leadership, to share data across the organization and with the Board at the right time intervals and at the right depth, and to shift the planning and budgeting process at the organization to focus on outcomes. It’s also taken a fair amount of capacity building to help staff frame their measures of success in ways that we can actually measure.
None of this would have been possible without a data leader like Johanna. She’s the unbribable umpire, calling fair balls and strikes on what the data is showing. She’s the strategic sage, who understands the priorities of the leadership team and the real day-to-day challenges of what happens on the ground, and is helping us use the data to make decisions at both ends of that spectrum. She’s the omniscient narrator who can help us construct the story we need to, from the data. She has the technical expertise of a researcher, and the facilitator expertise of an educator. If you haven’t yet found your own version of a Johanna for your organization, I’d highly recommend it.
Change happens slowly, and then all at once
It’s taken OMCA nearly a decade of work to get to this moment, but now it feels like we’re on a train barrelling forward into new and exciting territory. We’ve been pleased to find that the word is out — audiences are looking for something different from museums, grantmakers are beginning to ask for more meaningful metrics, museum staff are advocating for the rights of disenfranchised communities, donors are looking for a social return on investment, young people are looking for new ways and reasons to engage with culture, the list keeps going.
Given where we find ourselves now in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, we also believe that our community is looking for opportunities to stay socially distant and yet socially connected with their friends and neighbors. The personal and communal risks associated with social isolation have perhaps never been greater. We know that we have so much more to learn as we continue, and we’re excited to share it with you as we do.
This story is part of a publication on Medium exploring how arts organizations are adapting to reflect the changing demographics of California, engaging with their communities, and becoming more resilient organizations as part of the New California Arts Fund at The James Irvine Foundation.
