Head on over to art:21‘s blog and check out IMA’s very own Maxwell L. Anderson as he continues the conversation on museums and deaccessioning. You can read his post here.

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.

Two things in particular which set our Dashboard effort apart from other business intelligence or executive dashboard tools are the way we engage our staff in the process, and the extended integration we’ve done with core museum systems.

In the past several weeks, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the theory and the underpinning logic of why any museum would consider moving forward with a strategy like this.  If you’re just joining the discussion you can find the previous articles here:

1. Walking The Talk
2. Reasons for Transparency
3. Impact on Institutional Culture

This week we’ll take a detailed look at how the Indianapolis Museum of Art implemented these ideas in the IMA Dashboard.  We’ll examine how we structured the experience, what our goals were and what some of the results and unintended consequences turned out to be.

We’ve had some really great questions and points raised in the comment sections of the previous articles, and I’d really like to hear questions / thoughts from the peanut gallery as it were.  Don’t be shy!  I’ll do my best to respond to every thoughtful comment in turn.

Transparency in Practice: IMA’s Online Dashboard

As discussed in previous posts, one of the most important aspects for museums wishing to take steps to be more transparent about their successes and failures is a decision about the best way to share this information.  There are many ways museums might accomplish this. Ideally an organization’s information should be freely available to all interested parties with a very low barrier to access. Many museums have adopted the practice of making their annual reports and even tax returns available online for public access. It would be difficult to make the argument that these mechanisms provide “easy access” to this information since these documents are often lengthy, technical, and difficult to interpret.  The investment required by a member of the public must be high enough to overcome these barriers in order to develop an understanding of the museum’s performance.  While well intended, this method of presentation obfuscates the information which, if shared in a simpler more user-friendly model, might otherwise lead to valuable interactions and discussions with media, donors and the general public.

In the summer of 2007, the Indianapolis Museum of Art began to take steps to capitalize on an institution-wide effort and commitment to organizational Transparency. A team of web developers and graphics designers led by the Chief Information Officer set out to design a presentation of information and statistics about the museum which would enable an at-a-glance interaction as well support of deep-diving investigations into specific topics of interest. The team desired a system which was easy to digest and easy to navigate, and could support the wide array of information important to the mission of a diverse institution.  The project took inspiration from contemporary web design and interaction trends to create a site which would feel fresh, fun and visually engaging.  Feeling that many corporate dashboards were both intimidating and hard to understand, the team strove for a simplicity of presentation that could hook interested visitors into a deeper investigation and tracking of the museum’s performance over time. Finally, the institution needed an easy to use tool which could be integrated into the pre-existing workflows and job demands of many of the different staff around the museum.  The result was a tool called the IMA Dashboard, which was launched by the museum in September, 2007 and later released as open-source software for the benefit of the larger museum community.  Many museums and institutions have downloaded this software and expressed an interest in using it to fuel similar endeavors within their own organizations.

Figure 1 - The IMA Dashboard

The selection of an initial set of statistics for the Dashboard was undertaken by the senior management team of the museum and focused on metrics which had direct impact and bearing on the mission of the museum.  Nine statistics were selected initially covering areas such as, the acquisition of art, educational tours, membership, financial performance, horticultural activities (the IMA is an accredited horticultural institution), and attendance.  Statistics are arranged by topic or by department and visitors are invited to explore related bits of information.

The automated reporting of statistics to the Dashboard was a topic of much discussion early in the development of this tool.  At first glance, the technical slickness and wizardry of an automatically updated dashboard seems to hold much promise.  In reality, several factors existed that complicated this fact and have led the IMA to a slightly different approach.  Remember first, that a key desire of pursuing a policy of institutional Transparency is not only to share that information with our external constituents, but with our internal constituencies as well.  The automation of statistics is convenient in that it saves effort and attention on the part of the museum staff, but can frequently and easily result in neglect.  This result can be attributed more to human nature than to any lack of effort.  Parents of young children can attest that we are conditioned at an early age to tune out automated processes, or expected interruptions.  This is, in fact, the opposite of what we want to encourage in our staff.  Since these are “mission critical” statistics, we want staff members to attend to and understand them each and every month.  If a small amount of data entry causes staff members to pause and internalize this data at the same time that it is deriving a benefit for the public, so much the better.  Secondly, computers are notoriously bad at predicting exceptions to the rule.  Take attendance counting for example.  Institutions can make rules about the hours the museum is open, and about when they expect certain numbers of staff to report, but museum staff cannot tell the computer how to anticipate a weather related closing, or a special event on a day the museum is normally closed.  These cases all require human intervention.  Likewise, there are many types of statistics which are important to the operation of the museum, for which no automated system currently exists.  The IMA tracks the number of hours conservators spend treating works of art in our collection.  We think it is important, that despite all their other responsibilities, conservators should continue to treat the works in our collection regularly.  While many different types of time-tracking software exist, our conservators already have a system of tracking this information that works well for them.  So instead of spending time and money purchasing, integrating and training staff so that we can automate this system, we simply ask them to cut and paste their hours into a web form once a month.

The involvement of museum staff in the selection, authoring, and maintenance of these statistics is a fundamental priority for the Dashboard tool.  As discussed earlier, utilizing members of the staff in the collection, reporting, and monitoring of key statistics is an important way to engage them with how and why certain numbers are the way they are and how the museum might improve its performance over time. Staff members from various departments were invited to submit statistics which they felt would be important to track.  The web team worked with these staff members to author, refine, and create the statistics they suggested.  Each statistic is assigned to the museum staff member most directly responsible for monitoring that information.  Ideally, updating the Dashboard will coincide with existing workflows and reporting tasks that staff members are already performing. The frequency at which each statistic is updated varies depending on how quickly that information changes, from five minute updates for automated attendance counting to twice annually for horticultural plantings on the museum’s campus.  Email reminders are sent to the assigned staff members and updates consist of a simple cut-and-paste operation taking less than one minute and very little technical knowledge. As of this writing, the IMA Dashboard maintains statistics in 6 different topic areas across 13 departments.  42 statistics are current tracked and maintained by 31 staff members. These statistics have been maintained by the staff usefully for over two years as of this writing.

Several of the statistics recorded become quite interesting and even compelling examples of improvements and challenges encountered by our museum during the past year. For example, the museum has a commitment to reducing our energy consumption.  As a result, we track the total kilowatt-hours per month we consume as stated on our gas and electric utility bills. (See Figure 2) We have been relatively successful in this endeavor and have in fact reduced our energy consumption year-over-year in 30 of the last 34 months.  In February 2009, we used 22% less energy as compared to just one year earlier, while in September 2009 we used just 2% less energy than September of 2008.

Figure 2 – The tracking of energy consumption on the IMA Dashboard

Not all statistics are so rosy however.  Financial statistics show that, as a result of the economic downturn, the value of our endowment holdings decreased by almost $100M in a six-month period between September 2008 and April 2009.  Statistics show a 46% shortfall in contributed income compared to the budgeted projections in December 2008, and an adjustment of those revenue estimates in the following month. Early in 2009 the museum went through a strategic restructuring of staff positions resulting in the elimination of several part-time and full-time staff positions – a fact which is reflected clearly on the Dashboard update of our Employee Count and distribution on March 10, 2009. While these statistics are not among the shining examples of museum performance, we are thankful for them. They have given us a chance to engage with donors, board members, funding agencies, and our local city government about the reality of the challenges the museum is facing and our plans for addressing them.  The way these “bad” statistics would be received weighed heavily on the minds of the senior management team as we discussed this series of tough decisions. The ability of the Dashboard to serve as a positive seed for discussion is explained by Anderson, “The point of the Dashboard is both to crow when we see positive trends, of course, but also to show where we have room to improve, either through our actions or as a result of the generosity and support of others.“

Overall, the Dashboard has been received very positively by the IMA staff and senior management in particular.

“The dashboard has been a persuasive tool to use with the news media. Certain journalists who we work with on a regular basis know to check the dashboard for facts and figures, though they’ll still often verify the information with our public relations staff. I believe that the transparency that the dashboard allows permits us to have additional credibility with members of the media. They know that we’re not hiding information from them.”

-Katie Zarich, Director of Public Affairs, IMA

“In my opinion, the IMA’s dashboard has served as a visible reminder of our accountability to our supporters and the communities that we serve.  It is remarkable to me that it is not the data that has gotten the most attention, but the mere act of posting the information for public view.  By openly sharing the information, it has helped to build a sense of trust with our constituencies.  Mechanically speaking, the Dashboard is so user friendly that it enables those who own the data to update it using minimal time and effort.  In order to be a sustainable tool, I think it is important to have this ability to disperse responsibility for its maintenance and to minimize the additional time burden on staff to keep it current.  The one thing I don’t think we have quite figured out is how to incorporate the Dashboard as an information source or motivational tool for staff.  It is a challenge to balance what is interesting and useful to outside users with the needs and interests from an internal management perspective.”

Anne Munsch – Chief Finance Officer, IMA

More recently, the Dashboard has been used to illustrate museum visitor demographics accomplished through the collection of zip codes from visitors to the museum’s campus. This admissions data is then correlated to demographic data about race, age, income and educational attainment in the museum’s local community.  The information is presented in a simple map interface which allows the public to explore these demographics at their leisure. (See Figure 3)  Attendance tracking software utilizes heat-sensitive cameras to detect and automatically count the visitors to the museum.  This data is automatically integrated with the Dashboard tool and drives graphs and charts allowing year-to-year comparisons and attendance projections. (See Figure 4)

Figure 3 – A demographic comparison of museum admissions by zip code

Figure 4 – A comparative graph of month to month museum attendance

Next week we’ll conclude this series of posts with a set of suggestions for museums to use when staging their own efforts online with transparency.  I’d love to hear about ways in which these articles are being discussed in your museums or particular struggles or flaws in these arguments. -Rob

Community – the culture of this gathering – is where the real diffusion and impact occur.  Although the speakers and panelists were great and a good trigger for conversation, the value really took hold in the hallways over coffee or in some of Portland’s great pubs over a beer.

In thinking about this next post on transparency, it struck me that the same is true about our own museums as well.  The culture of our institution – the hallway and cafe conversations that happen between colleagues – is where much of the success and innovation will come from.

At the MCN conference we heard some great conversations about strategy and innovation.  But I think all would realize, the harder part of strategy is finding a way for it to take hold and become REAL.

As a final salvo offering reasons why your museum should adopt open and transparent practices around institutional performance, let’s talk a bit more about the impact this choice can have on the culture of your museum.

If you’re just joining the conversation, here are links to parts 1 and 2 of this series. (Part 1 – Walking the Talk) (Part 2 – Reasons for Transparency)  Please join the conversation in the comments and tell us what you think! A little virtual water cooler would help us all.

Reasons For Transparency: Impact on Institutional Culture

“The organizations that will be truly successful in this environment are those that have integrated Transparency as part of their organizational culture and not just their communications strategy. To the extent that the two are inter-related, the communications strategist has a substantial role to play here.”

-Mark Hannah, “Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic”, PBS.org, January 7, 2009

The infusion of an attitude of Transparency and an institutional understanding of strategy will allow our museums to continue to mature steadily and continuously over time, but these goals require a cultural shift for our staff. One organization which understands the impact of Transparency and the role of company culture is the internet shoe company, Zappos (recently acquired by Amazon). As illustrated by Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh,

“It’s a very different world today. With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about a bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter.

The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost instantaneously as well.

The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly anticipate every possible touch-point that could influence the perception of your company’s brand.”

-Tony Hsieh, “Your Culture is Your Brand”, Zappos CEO Blog, January 3, 2009

Hsieh makes an important point that museums should observe as well. In order to remain culturally relevant, museums must address this inevitable and global cultural shift towards ubiquitous information and user experience or risk being sidelined both online as well as in our communities.

Putting Transparency into practice in an institution has a number of consequences which can offer significant benefits to museums. The act of publishing information for public scrutiny always elevates the attention that is given to that effort.  Whereas staff members may have been apt to forget about tracking performance in a key area, a commitment to publish that information pushes professional staff members to pay more attention regarding how that information will be perceived outside the walls of the museum.  Ideally these are features museums want and need to be tracking anyway, but the reality is that when no one is looking, it’s easy to pay less attention. Transparency then, is an effective mechanism for generating this external motivation which can result in measurable improvements for the museum.

When these key metrics are tracked, organizations will be able to easily identify and develop trends and forecasts for these mission critical pieces of information. Since institutions are committed to a timely publishing of this information they will also benefit from more timely and accurate disclosure of problem areas not only to the public but also to internal constituencies. Indicators of success and poor performance can help management teams identify areas which need more attention or resources without simply sweeping the problem under the carpet.  Measuring which areas are succeeding can help museums better optimize how much effort is required to continue performing well in that area.  Perhaps staff can spend half as much time or money and achieve the same results?  Mission-critical information such as this is a crucial underpinning that will allow management teams to execute good decision-making based on fact and not opinion.  These steps can facilitate not only cost savings, but time savings over the long term as well.

Next week, we’ll begin to look more practically at how the Indianapolis Museum of Art put some of these theories into practice and what kind of impact / experience we’ve seen since doing so.  Again, I’ve really enjoyed some of the comments offered to these posts… but understand that there are several shy ones among you!  Don’t Fear!  Pipe up with your thoughts… I’ve generally found our little blog community to be very open to opinions of all different stripes!  -Rob

Saying that transparency is a “good idea” is not enough to address concerns that many museums have about sharing  information in this way.  Today, we’ll spend some more time examining a few reasons why museum administrators should seriously consider an open approach to transparency as a strategic choice in running the museum.

Again, please chime in with thoughts / questions / analogies / etc…  Your thoughts really add to and enrich the conversation.  Do you think this would work in your museum?  What would be the biggest concerns that would arise?

Reasons for Transparency: The Internet Will Out You

Since a common counter argument to efforts for Transparency is the impact of information sharing on the museum’s brand and reputation, it is useful to explore this in the context of today’s realities. Seen initially in the rise of the blogosphere and more recently in the emergence of micro-blogging and real-time search, the pace of information creation and the ease of access to this information has changed the ways in which a museum’s brand and reputation are perceived in the media and online. The advent of the real-time web means that the invested public frequently has as much input into a museum’s online reputation as media professionals do.  An increasingly information-savvy audience is becoming more and more sophisticated in their ability to decipher fact versus spin as they surf this info-sphere. Author Clive Thompson highlights the impact of these facts on Transparency in his article for WIRED Magazine,

“But here’s the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation.”  - Clive Thompson, “The See-Through CEO”, WIRED Magazine – Issue 15.04, March, 2007.

This reality is not restricted only to government and for-profit corporations to deal with, but in fact, has already reached deeply into the way that museums and non-profit institutions operate in modern culture. “There is no outside world anymore, just a world–one that is blogged, Facebooked, Twittered, and utterly porous. The extent to which we can control our image is directly proportionate to our honesty about ups and downs in a context that we can to some degree define” points out Maxwell Anderson, The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

A common reaction and perhaps our gut response is to see Transparency as just another public relations tool which can be employed to enhance an institution’s brand and reputation in the public’s eye.  While efforts in Transparency can have a positive impact on a museum’s reputation, that’s not the point says Anderson, “To view a dashboard primarily as a PR tool is to miss entirely the point of Transparency, which is to influence contemporary organizations to act with greater responsibility.“ Likewise, author Thompson points out that, “Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won’t work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it – or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.”

Reasons for Transparency: Impact on Mission and Performance

“I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that, at a time when new media technologies are changing the rules of journalism, companies are placing a new emphasis on Transparency. Access to, and distribution of, information is being rapidly democratized and smart companies know to get out ahead of this trend. However, as with many corporate buzzwords (e.g., “quality” and “innovation”), the concept is suffering from inflation as too many companies claim “Transparency” as part of their identity without really walking the talk.” -Mark Hannah, “Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic”, PBS.org, January 7, 2009

It is a natural tendency to promote what is good about our institutions and hide what is not. As professionals, we’ve been conditioned over many years to treat the internet as just another communications medium, but in fact it’s not.  What does it take for a museum to begin the adoption of transparent methods and attitudes without falling into thinking of Transparency as just another PR tool, and what are the advantages of this strategy that might compel institutions to make the leap?

Museums are mission-driven organizations. For a museum, success cannot be measured in financial terms alone.  Sometimes – in service to our mission – museums make decisions which would play very poorly on Wall Street. However, these very decisions are those that set us apart most clearly from the for-profit world and offer us a chance to communicate with our constituents about our mission and about the unique and important place museums hold in our communities.

It is safe to say that museums spend large amounts of time and money every year on strategic planning – and for good reason.  A healthy and vibrant strategic plan is an invaluable tool to use in divining which activities we should pursue and which we should not.  The choices we make about which activities to forgo often say more about our strategic purpose than those we choose to pursue.  A common thread among many museums seems to be an addiction to an over-abundant array of worthwhile programs and activities. Solid strategic planning helps us focus activities on those which will achieve a measurable impact for the mission of the institution and result in long-term progress towards those stated goals.

Museums face difficult challenges when trying to measure whether or not they are being successful.  Success cannot be measured solely by the size of their endowments, attendance figures, or recent coverage in the press. Unlike their for-profit counterparts – where profit/loss statements can ultimately separate the winners and losers – a museum’s success has much more to do with achieving its mission and its degree of impact within the community.  Defining what success looks like and the establishment of benchmarks for comparison is absolutely vital to achieving a continuous improvement to goals and success over the long term. In his 2004 paper entitled “Metrics of Success in Art Museums”, Maxwell Anderson points out that “The root of the problem is that there is no longer an agreed-upon method of measuring achievement” and proposes several sets of measurements by which museums might gauge their success over time. Of course, the task of defining and agreeing on common metrics to be used across institutions seems to be a daunting task, however Anderson highlights the fact that, “While many challenges beset art museum leaders today, finding a way to measure performance is accordingly among the field’s most urgent.” and, “Without generally accepted metrics, arts organizations will have more and more trouble making a case for themselves.”

Choosing such a set of primary metrics for your institution can help to clarify and codify the relationship between your organization’s mission and its strategic plan.  These conversations are perhaps the most important discussions that could possibly be had among senior management executives and board members. As Andrew Taylor points out in his blog the Artful Manager,

“Of course, such systems [dashboards] raise a rather vexing challenge: what, exactly, are the few key indicators you would need to watch to monitor your success? It’s this question that actually proves to be more effective than the dashboard tool itself. To know what you should monitor, you need to know what you’re trying to do, and you also have to define what success looks like (more people? happier people? more art? better reviews? prolific artists?).” - Andrew Taylor, “Keeping an Eye on Dashboards”, The Artful Manager Blog, October 20.

It is important to note that this is a point at which the notion of Transparency and Metrics of Success in your museum are very closely related.  Anderson’s paper makes a convincing argument regarding the measurement of those efforts which are the most important to meeting our mission objectives.  Furthermore an establishment of appropriate metrics and benchmarks can have tangible benefits for museum operation.  Author Jason Saul illustrates this point in his book on benchmarking for non-profits,

“Thus, benchmarking has many direct and indirect benefits: increasing the impact of mission-related activities, raising internal standards, improving performance, attracting more funding, uncovering (and fixing) hidden weaknesses, and overall, improving the public face of the organization.” – Jason Saul, Benchmarking for nonprofits: how to measure, manage, and improve performance (Fieldstone Alliance, 2004) pg 12.

If these benchmarks or metrics are indeed the key drivers of our success, is it not also the case that these are the same facts and figures we should be making available to our constituents? By so doing, we begin to build an ongoing trust based on measurable fact and open a door to rational and informed conversations about why continued support of our museum is so vital.

Unfortunately, choosing the statistics and deciding to share them is not enough. Our museums are composed of an amalgam of individuals from many different social, educational, and professional backgrounds. Many of whom are extremely intelligent and passionate about their service to our institutions. Their daily choices, attitudes and activities are required to actually put these strategies and metrics into action and achieve the institution’s mission.  We cannot succeed in achieving our mission without the buy-in and understanding of these key staff members.

I had originally authored this as a paper to be published in print form, but I think it will actually work better in a blog format like this one.  I’ve really appreciated the feedback and input readers have contributed to my last few posts, and would love your thoughts on this text as well.

Perhaps the most prevalent concern shared by peers about adopting similar approaches to transparency is a latent fear of the unknown, or a feeling that sharing the gritty details with the public will be too overwhelming and therefore misconstrued.  I’m happy to say that the wheels haven’t fallen off the IMA’s apple cart yet, hopefully this series will illuminate some of the benefits we’ve seen from taking these steps.

Walking the Talk – Part 1

The concept of Transparency has received significant attention in the media and online recently.  This attention comes at a time when public doubt in corporations, government and corporate executives is at an all-time high. High profile failures of some of the nation’s largest and most trusted institutions have shaken our assumptions about what had always seemed to be untouchable industries. Museums have always jealously guarded their trusted place in the public’s perception, but is there a risk that this trust will someday be lost?  As caretakers of this trust, what is the best way to foster open communication about the challenges and opportunities that face us as we try to achieve the mission of our museums?  As comprehensive and easy access to operational information becomes the norm, how can museums embrace this as an opportunity and confront internal fears about sharing their performance metrics with the public?

A Working Definition of Transparency

To begin, we must first come to a common understanding about Transparency. Institutional Transparency is a concept that is notoriously difficult to define precisely.  Principally, Transparency can be defined as the open sharing of information regarding a museum’s operations and performance.  But questions soon arise regarding what to share, when to share, and how to share it. These issues are much more significant for museums to consider when crafting an organizational stance about Transparency.

Museums and museum staff members are always striving for the best. We craft strategies that seek to make our program offerings vital and engaging to our community.  We seek to build our collections by acquiring important works of art.  We take extensive measures to protect and preserve the works in our care. We attempt to run more and more efficient operations by carefully crafting our budgets while, at the same time, seeking to increase our earned and contributed income so that we can continue to be effective in fulfilling our mission. If we’re honest, we would all agree that we succeed in some of these areas and fail in others.  We are not afraid to admit among ourselves that we are not yet the perfect museum which we strive to be, yet we seldom talk about these challenges to our constituents and donors.  We share a common fear that exposing these negative facts about our museums will result in condemnation from the press, a loss of respect in the community, and perhaps most significantly financial loss from decreasing membership or donor revenue.  As a result, our staff works hard to control the flow of information and shield the museum from negative consequences, crafting careful rationalizations which attempt to address and make up for our short comings.

Transparency in our institutions has a goal of counteracting these tendencies | realities with a type of radical authenticity.  Our culture values authenticity and looks for it in our public officials and the institutions we trust. For a museum, authenticity means sharing both the good and the bad in addition to the reasons, circumstances, context and challenges that face us everyday. Transparency then, is the ongoing discipline of practicing radical authenticity and demonstrating to the public whatever degree of integrity and operational excellence our museum possesses at the time.

This notion flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of our public relations and marketing departments who for years have sought to protect us from negative public sentiment and donor frustration. Some express concern that too much Transparency would be a bad thing.  Like any tool or technique, too much of a good thing can indeed be harmful.  When considering issues of Transparency we must do so thoughtfully and carefully, with a goal of maintaining an institutional integrity which is beyond reproach and at the same time, maintain a commitment to an open and authentic relationship with our constituents.

Several common challenges will help illustrate these issues. Museums must consider carefully, for example, their stance on sharing the purchase price of works of art in their collections.  Does doing so, enhance or harm the public’s understanding and relationship with these works of art?  Will sharing this information allow the museum to evaluate or improve its performance in some areas?  What impact, if any, would this action have upon the broader practice of art collecting? At the IMA, we have chosen NOT to share the purchase price or valuation of accessioned works of art in our collection. In addition, we have chosen that we WILL share the valuation of works slated for deaccessioning as well as the prices realized from their sale at auction and then listing the ways these proceeds are used towards the acquisition of new art for the collection.

Deaccessioned Artworks from the IMA's Website

Museums often depend on catering and space rental revenues to contribute to their operating budgets. To make a blanket statement saying that we will always share comprehensive financial information for all of our departments would mean that we would reveal financial information which would damage our competitive advantage against other catering and rental operations. Obviously, doing so is not in the best interests of the institution.

Rather than attempting to determine which information is eligible to be shared, perhaps the best approach is to instead discuss which sorts of information should not be shared. This would certainly cover sharing information which would break laws, breach contracts, violate trust or compromise privacy. Each of these situations would constitute a loss of integrity on the part of the museum.  This leaves a vast set of information that does not violate these caveats resulting in a freedom to share many different facets of museum operations.

Is it possible for a museum to share too much information? Do we risk placing an inordinate amount of emphasis on the sharing of information without a clear understanding of the expectations of our audience? Blogger Jeff Brooks examines this in his posting about the IMA’s Dashboard.

“It would be easy to say it’s too much, that it’s too arcane, too detailed, too boring for donors to care about.

But remember, one person’s boring factoid is another’s hobby. Or hobbyhorse. By putting it all out there, the Indianapolis Museum is telling its public that anyone who cares is an insider. Is it possible someone will go ballistic about their electricity use, or their ownership of possibly plundered art? Sure. But it’s not likely. And their openness defuses these things — much more effectively than trying to keep secrets.

If the information is too much, nobody will look at it. Even so, the very fact that they’re sharing it makes people respect the museum more. And who knows what info-sated donors might choose to do for an organization they feel trusts and respects them?” - Jeff Brooks, “Museum opens the books to anyone who cares”, Donor Power Blog, December 3, 2007,

Looking at the question from a different perspective raises an interesting rule of thumb. If an investment of staff time and effort will be made measuring certain statistics, then museums should choose to measure those things which will offer insight to change or improve our future performance, and shy away from those measurements that will not impact staff actions no matter what the results.  Perhaps this seems too obvious at first glance, but the careful selection of statistics that matter is part and parcel to operating as a transparent institution.  Creating a needle in the haystack model of information sharing does not result in better information for the public, or museum staff for that matter.

In the coming weeks we’ll continue to look at a variety of issues at play when seeking to implement transparency in practice at your museum.  Next week we’ll focus on the underlying reasons why transparency is a good idea, and one that all museums should seek to adopt.

Again, we’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions to these ideas.  The IMA has a few years of experience in this area, but we still find that we’re learning more and more each day.  I’m sure if you focus hard enough, you’ll find some discrepancies or deficiencies in our efforts… in fact, we hope you do!  At least then we’ll know about them and can take steps to fix them!  Thanks in advance!  -Rob

I have the distinct pleasure of being in Daniel‘s class this fall, Museums and Technology.  While it is surprising for my classmates that I would take a class about something I do already, I am excited for the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the meaning of technology for the museum experience and how the visitor is affected by these changes. I see continual parallels between issues encountered with visitors in physical space and issues we are encountering all over again in our digital spaces. I’ve talked about Twitter before and I have been thinking about how it is harnessed by museums and where we are going wrong.

We were talking about Twitter again in a recent class, more specifically what we consider to be a successful museum tweet, and why. It’s very hard to nail down, and even harder to do. The main reason is because it’s so hard to avoid becoming a marketing ploy, something which happens without rapt attention. A museums use of twitter now stands as an analogy for the way the actual museum interacts with its visitors and the traditional barrier between the inner workings of an institution and the public at large. So many museums need to release their stranglehold on twitter feeds to actually let interesting information get out.

I was at the Indianapolis Greek Festival this past weekend, and I couldn’t help to think that they were doing something right.

There were throngs of people, tons of Greek food, everyone jostling and yelling and having a great time, but here’s the part that baffled me- you had to pay to get in, and the food was delicious, but quite pricey. What is the Holy Trinity parish doing that connects so much with their audience that museums cannot seem to do? I think we can be the Agora marketplace discussed by Dr. Steven Zucker (@drszucker) and Dr. Nancy Proctor (@nancyproctor) a vibrant place for community and discussion, in the same way that the Greek festival is. I think the problem is balance- how do we sell ourselves as experts in our field while maintaining that we want everyone else’s opinion, too?

Some people are getting it right, figuring out how to sift through all the noise and clutter to connect with their audience while maintaining their voice. One such person is the British musician Imogen Heap, who felt a divide between herself and her fans before she started to utilize blogs and Twitter, not dissimilar to the separation between and institution and it’s community. In a recent interview with Melissa Block on NPR, she describes the divide quite succinctly. She then discusses what it’s like to have that direct connection throughout the process of making her music.

It’s been so amazing. I’ve always struggled with this barrier that I felt like I’d had up until blogging came along. Just one comment from somebody really sparks something in me. It doesn’t need to be this huge wall between me and the listeners anymore. I really thrive on that.”

@ImogenHeap gets it- the audience has become part of the process, and there’s no going back.