If you’re just joining us, you can find links to the previous articles here (tag: transparency)

To leave you with a bit more to chew on before we head off, this last article provides some suggestions for how to implement your organization’s own dashboard.  Feel free to add your own suggestions / questions to the comment stream after the jump!

7 Guidelines for Implementing Dashboards

For museums that would like to take the plunge into revealing and tracking their performance metrics online, the software used in the creation of the IMA’s Dashboard tool has been made freely available to the community under an open source license. (http://code.google.com/p/museum-dashboard/) Regardless of the tools used to embrace practices of Transparency, the following are some pragmatic suggestions to consider during your planning processes.

1. Choose a Few Key Metrics

Identify tangible and measurable statistics which can serve as leading or trailing indicators of your institutions success at meeting its mission. Many elements in mission statements are intangible and difficult to measure.  Identifying a few metrics which can serve as key indicators of success to mission is of critical importance. (See Maxwell L. Anderson’s “Metrics of Success in Art Museums” for a discussion on this topic)

2. Identify and Share Areas for Improvement

Museums should include statistics to describe areas in which they would like to improve.  Being open about areas in which we are not excelling creates opportunities for discussion with our constituents and an extrinsic motivation for staff members trying to excel in these areas.  Also, it’s only possible to demonstrate progress if we first share our deficiencies.

3. Simplify the Presentation

Resist the temptation to squeeze all of your information onto one screen.  Executive dashboards often suffer from information overload. Dense displays of data can take time and significant effort to decode and understand even for the most invested museum employee.  If we hope to engage the less invested and ever-so driven-to-distraction web visitor with statistics about our museum, we must start with the assumption that this information will be experienced in a glance.  Our hope is to capture that attention in the moment and offer deeper and more meaningful content easily upon further investigation.

4. Involve Staff

As discussed previously, one of the primary benefits of publishing an organization’s performance in a dashboard is the impact doing so can have on internal communications with the museum’s own staff members.  The active involvement of staff from a variety of departments is critical to disseminating an understanding of mission-driven performance metrics and serves to infuse the organization with a culture of honesty, openness, and a desire and expectation of perpetual and incremental improvement.

5. Explain Your Reasoning

Describe to your audience why you think each particular statistic is worth measuring.  Transparency tools, such as dashboards, offer exciting opportunities to share and describe the ways your institution is attempting to achieve its mission.  Museums should use these opportunities to explain why the data looks the way it does.  Are you succeeding, facing challenges, radically improved in this area recently?  The deeper content behind each statistic gives your institution the chance to engage with interested constituents.

6. Describe the Way You Measure

We all know that it’s easy to deceive an audience with statistics; to make the numbers say whatever we want them to.  Be explicit in describing the ways you derived the information you are sharing.  If you make any assumptions, be sure to indicate them.  If you based your information on another source, be sure to reference it accurately. Information without this description is unverifiable and subject to manipulation.  This documentation will also serve institutions well during occasions of staff turn-over, preserving a continuity of reporting and responsibility.

7. Participate in the Creation of Open Standards

An extremely valuable result of many institutions adopting similar strategies for sharing performance metrics online would be the ability to benchmark and compare statistics across institutions.  Current resources for museum comparative statistics are inconsistent, poorly specified and opaque in their measurement specifics making them generally useless for cross-institutional benchmarking.  The community needs a more sophisticated way of thinking about common comparisons which might be made between institutions and how those measurements might be achieved and normalized to facilitate a better common-ground of understanding.  The impact on the efficient and professional management of museums would be profound.

* * * * *

It is undeniable that museums have witnessed their role in the world change due to the dramatic increase of information and access resulting from the influence of the internet on contemporary culture.  This change has provided museums previously unimaginable opportunities for reaching audiences who are quite literally “a world away”.  However, it is important to realize that we now live our lives in the open much more than we ever have in the past.  Concepts of privacy and previously accepted social norms are changing as well. We can see and experience that this is true personally, but museums have been slow to embrace this fact.  The adoption of open and transparent attitudes toward information sharing allows museums to take an information-savvy and culturally relevant approach to engage audiences regarding why museums are important to our communities, and to share the unique challenges faced by mission-driven organizations in today’s marketplace.  Institutions which can embrace these trends will realize significant tangible and strategic benefits.

As numbers twirl around my head like 10-year old Chinese gymnasts (they are definitely NOT 16 that’s for sure), I thought I’d share with you some of my favorites. You can find a lot of these stats on the IMA’s dashboard, but some of the numbers are not accessible to the public…until now. In the Museum’s ongoing dedication to full transparency, here’s IMA by the numbers:

Full-time Employees: 197

Average Daily Blog Readers: 220

To Live Forever Exhibition Attendance through Aug. 11: 18,254

IMA Members: 10,454

Pieces of Glass in the Efroymson Entrance Pavilion: 225

Days until To Live Forever Closes: 24

Tickets Sold to Summer Nights Film Rocky Horror Picture Show: 714

Percentage of Web visitors from Indiana: 52%

IMA Curators: 12

Visitors to IMA, July 2008: 47,548

Cubic Yards of Concrete poured for 2005 renovation: 25,000

Square feet of IMA building: 492,000

Nugget Factory productions on YouTube: 100

Women named Pam on Staff: 5

Designers named Matt on Staff: 3 (2 graphic & 1 web)

Days until Power and Glory: Court Arts from the Ming Dynasty opens: 73

Number of Views to IMA’s first-ever YouTube video: 3,593

Number of days I’ve worked at the IMA: 1,354

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/08/14/ima-by-the-numbers/feed/ 2 numbers http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/04/22/an-earthday-post-from-anne/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/04/22/an-earthday-post-from-anne/#comments Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:58:05 +0000 Anne Laker http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/04/22/an-earthday-post-from-anne/ Today we are pleased to welcome Anne Laker, our newest IMA blogger, representing the Education department. She is also known for her compassion for all things green, so please enjoy her inaugural post on this most appropriate occasion.

Never underestimate the potential of a bruised banana. Around the office at the IMA, my desk is known as repository for fruit that’s past its prime. Colleagues know—as an obsessive recycler—that I will repurpose their bananas by taking them home, tossing them in the freezer and using them in a smoothie.

The re-use ethic is the foundation of freeganism, the practice of strategic food salvaging. Freegans use their wits to rescue perfectly good food out of the back doors of grocery stores and other venues. Freegans and freecyclers can imagine other uses for other people’s garbage. [If you are an Indy-based freegan, please respond to this post!]

I love freeganism because it raises questions about transgression and imagination—topics with which an art museum concerns itself. What risks are necessary to alter current systems and make the planet greener? Can artists and scientists re-engineer our technologies, and our worldviews—in time to save our skins from climate change? Designer Bruce Mau, whose name gets mentioned a lot around the IMA, put out a book and exhibition called Massive Change. His agenda is to show how the world can be re-designed (think Google Earth, water purification machines, biotechnologies, etc.) to save itself. Creativity is required to re-think bad systems, such as the coal-fired power plants that make Indiana the second most polluted state in the nation.

The IMA is doing its part to reduce our footprint. Our director of facilities has figured out to reduce our average monthly electricity and natural gas usage by over 21 percent since the beginning of 2006. That said, we are still struggling to institute recycling in public places at the museum. We can’t find a local recycling vendor that will accept plastics 1 – 7 and actually recycle them as advertised. The good news is that our frustration caused us to move from plastic plates to china plates in the IMA Cafe.

If you’re looking to green your outlook, check out some amazing events coming up: artist Fritz Haeg, who lived in a geodesic dome, created the Edible Estates garden project, and recently built a beaver dam on top of the Whitney Museum, is speaking at Herron School of Art today, (Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22).

Architect Maya Lin is speaking at the IMA next Tuesday, April 29, about the Indiana geologic inspiration for her installation Above and Below on the balcony of the galleries of Asian art. And as soon as the Tobias Theater opens, watch for Garbage Warrior, a documentary about New Mexico-based architect Michael Reynolds who builds buildings from trash.

In the film, Reynolds refers to himself as “the turd in the punch bowl” of the architecture world. That’s one way to put it. I’ll say: Thumbs up for creative (and green) transgressions.

A group of IMA staff (myself not included) attended the Museums and the Web conference in Montreal last week. This conference is an annual gathering for the ever-growing crowd of technology-focused staff in museums around the world. They also host the “Best of the Web” Awards. IMA’s project, Roman Art Webisodes, was picked last week as “Best Podcast.” IMA’s Dashboard picked up an Honourable Mention in the “Professional” category. We are excited that our work has been so well received by our peers.

Also, last week we were notified that Roman Art Webisodes were also chosen as an Official Honoree for the 2008 Webby Awards. A very competitive and widely entered contest, we placed in the top 15 in the Non-Profit/ Educational category for Interactive Advertisting. I was most excited about this competition since last year they honored David Bowie and he is on the judging committee this year. What could be better than winning an award from the same people who gave one to Ziggy Stardust. Needless to say we are delighted.

In other news, the Media and Technology Committee of the American Association of Museums has selected IMA’s Dashboard as the winner of a 2008 MUSE Award.

So who knows what’s next for us! We have entered many other projects in a variety of competitions, so hopefully as spring continues to progress we will have more good news…

Stateside…
Cincinnati.com
Ideum
Museumlab

And one in Dutch… (I love the Dutch!)

http://www.museum-wereld.nl/museum-geeft-zichzelf-prijs/

For more than 5 years, I didn’t think another dashboard could rival my Passat’s for coolness. And while it may not be exactly the same thing, I think the IMA’s new dashboard might just do it. So what’s so cool about our dashboard? We’re really the first museum in the world to use technology like this. The public now has access to statistics about attendance, the art collection and even our budget. For instance, folks can check to see how much we have spent so far this year and how it relates to what we projected in our 2007 budget. Visitors can also check to see how many people have visited Roman Art from the Louvre or shopped in the IMA Shop. For better or for worse, the IMA’s dashboard let’s you see the IMA from the inside. Just like my Passat’s dashboard at night, I hope that the IMA’s dash will show a different side of the Museum that people wouldn’t normally expect. We will constantly be updating the information on the site so check back. We may just surprise you with our coolness!

Speaking of coolness, I spent a good 30 minutes today discussing beer coozies with the IMA’s curator of contemporary art, Lisa Freiman. WHAT?! Let me explain…On November 1, the IMA is having an opening event for the next Forefront show, Ingrid Calame: Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway . Calame will speak at 7:00 pm about her work. Following the lecture, the IMA is throwing our own version of an “infield” party. We’re going to have kegs, tailgating food and yes, coozies. Here’s the details:

Join us for Opening Night / Thursday, November 1
7:00 pm ARTIST TALK
On the opening night of her exhibition, Calame discusses her work. Supported in part by the IMA Contemporary Art Society.

8:00 – 11:00 pm PARTY
Check out the exhibition – open until 9:00 pm – and then join us in our own infield in Pulliam Great Hall for a cash bar, light snacks, and the music of The Twin Cats. Special thanks to Lee Adams Tire.

IMA Members: FREE / Students with ID: $5 / Public: $10
RSVP for the party by Thursday, October 25 by calling 317-920-2651.

I had no doubt that we would get a crowd opening weekend. However, I am surprised at the enthusiasm the visitors have for the exhibition. For art that is over 2,000 years old, it still has an impressive fan base. It’s been really great to see the reaction people have had to the marketing campaign, but more importantly, it has been really nice to see the reaction people have had to the exhibition. People really love it. And the entire IMA staff is breathing a collective sigh of relief after opening weekend.

Everyday when I arrive at the office the first thing I do is check the attendance for the day before. Generally, the IMA hosts about 1,000 visitors a day. Since last Friday (the member preview day), we have doubled that figure daily. Can we keep this pace up? I hope so. In fact, I hope that as people see the exhibition and tell their family and friends about it, the number will continue to climb.

If you are interested, you can track our attendance by visiting this page.

I’ve been living with this exhibition for a year now and it’s really hard to believe that it’s finally open. Soon our lives and our blogs won’t have the Romans at the center. On to the next big thing I guess!