Three Types of Fun

Dalston Mirror House, Leandro Erlich, artist

Museums find fun challenging. On the one hand, they want to be places where families, adults, children, friends have fun, and choose to go for a good time. At the same time, museums want to—and need to—matter. They want to be recognized for their value and for contributing long-term benefit to the people and communities they serve.

One way in which museums have thought about managing this tug between being fun and being valuable is viewing themselves as being both nice and necessary. Museums are very nice. They are pleasant places. Children, families, school, and community groups visit museums, have a really good time, and want to return. Being necessary is challenging and requires deep understanding of a community’s promises and challenges.

While thinking about museums as being nice and necessary is somewhat helpful, it presents a dubious dichotomy. Life is not so simple that an episode—a museum visit, tour, conversation, or experience—can be classified as either nice or necessary. Clarifying for whom, and in what time frame quickly becomes complex.

Powerful, Yet Flabby

Fun is powerful as a judgment of an activity, a conversation, or an experience. “That’s a fun place to visit” or “This is fun” endorse a place and what it offers, whether it is food, family time, artwork, or dinosaurs. At the same time, fun is not very precise. In fact, it is flabby in its meaning. A good synonym for fun is elusive. None of the three most common synonyms, amusing, enjoyable, and pleasant, convey the social, exuberant, laugh-out-loud, exhilaration often associated with fun. Neither they, nor fun, hint at the long-term value of a rich moment. When something is not deemed fun, is it the opposite? Is it Dull? Boring? Unpleasant?

Making these distinctions is difficult because fun is situational, contextual, and often personal. Licking an ice cream cone that is melting down one’s arm might be fun for a toddler but not for a businessperson in a fine suit heading to an important meeting. Rock climbing is fun for an accomplished rock climber but not for a novice unprepared for the challenge. Even within a family, team, staff, or group of friends there are likely to be different definitions of fun.

The question of fun, however, is never far away. Regardless of a museum’s size or focus, the role of fun hovers in developing a strategic plan, shaping the visitor experience, presenting a program, and communicating with the audience. What will make people want to visit the museum? Return? Spread positive word of mouth? Feel the goodwill of a great visit?   

Recently at the kick-off meeting with a museum developing a learning framework, the director asked how fun fits into all the discussion about learning. My brief reply was not wholly adequate. Fun runs through the experiential mix of play, special family time, exploring interests, and being inspired.

Only a few days later, at a planning workshop for an emerging museum, the question of fun was also raised. Wasn’t the museum supposed to be fun for children and families? Wasn’t everything supposed to be fun? Silence. Though familiar with this question, I had no good answer. Two members of the group offered examples that, while not resolving the question, shed useful light on it. One person said she runs everyday and has for 20 years. It’s not fun but she looks forward to it and she wouldn’t skip it. Another person said he loves gardening, but it isn’t fun.

Already attuned to this question about fun, I took note when an educator at a charter school referred to Type Three Fun. She then clarified it as an intentional process of co-constructing meaning—a challenging, but satisfying experience. While I wasn’t able to hear what Type One and Two Fun are, the possibility of distinguishing among types of fun seemed promising.

Soon after, I learned that outdoor enthusiasts have a fun scale. Three types of fun capture the realities of active, outdoor adventures, like hiking, skiing, and climbing that are supposed to be fun. Rewarding and invigorating, these experiences can also be demanding and, sometimes, downright miserable.

·       Type One Fun is something that is enjoyable while it is happening and enjoyable reflecting on it. A plan comes together; the challenge is perfect; the weather cooperates.

·       Type Two Fun is miserable while it’s happening, but, in retrospect, it was fun. There might be horrifying moments but they get better in the rear-view mirror.

·       Type Three Fun is not fun at all, not at the time, and not in hindsight.

Roughly in this same territory, is an extreme sport, Tough Mudder, that is considered fun and not enjoyable.

Types of Fun in Museums

A museum of any size offers a variety of experiences, environments, and activities. This is a prime opportunity for a museum to serve an audience diverse in age, backgrounds, interests and expectations with its distinct mix of fun. Inspired by the fun typology of outdoor adventures, while focusing on museums in particular, three types of fun emerge.

Yuri Suzuki Sonic Playground
(Photo credit: Michael McKelvey)

Type One Fun is what we typically think of as fun. Often spontaneous and playful, it is entertaining, straightforward happiness. Beyond an openness to what’s happening and enjoying it, Type One Fun is easy; it demands relatively little effort on our part. Usually it involves sensorimotor engagement: delight in interacting with materials; pretending; seeing or hearing something astonishing; being tickled by something funny. The social aspect of Type One Fun is likely to involve sharing a joke with someone, being infected their laughter, having a shared moment of recognizing incongruity.

Type One Fun can be fleeting, an enjoyable distraction. Consequently, it may not be taken seriously. It should not, however, be dismissed too readily, especially as part of a museum’s rich and varied portfolio of experiences. Type One Fun—exploring air, mirrors, water play, dressing up in costumes—can also be an important addition to sometimes somber museum exhibits and programs.

Examples from all types of museums highlight the open-ended, playful, sometimes comical activities characteristic of Type One Fun that visitors enjoy.  

§  Face painting, with colors and creamy textures, transforms a familiar face and may bring out an inner animal or unknown species of butterfly

§  Making bubbles, creating a pocket of air in a thin iridescent film and watching them float, hover, and burst

§  Walking through the rooms of a house once occupied by a beloved author from childhood

§  Watching live animals at the zoo, noticing their movements, antics, and play, and feeling a connection to them

§  Striking an exact pose in front of a painting or sculpture mirroring the one on view

Type Two Fun is enjoyable engagement punctuated by fun. Both greater agency—choice, freedom, self-direction—and greater investment contribute to this kind of fun. Compared to the jocularity characteristic of Type One Fun, Type Two contains elements of amusement and gratifying moments of social, physical, emotional, or intellectual connection. The drama or beauty of phenomena such as a plasma globe; seeing ourselves in a new or unusual way; reconnecting with a favorite painting, place, or person in an interesting settings; or cleverly engineering a paper airplane design combine the engagement, accomplishment, and delight of Type Two Fun.

Type Two Fun: Seeing ourselves in
new ways (Photo credit: Vergeront)

Playing with context can shift the fun value in the museum fairly easily. Add a clown face to a rocket launcher target; set up hula hooping for 50 visitors; or climb through TapeScape the climbing structure made of lengths of clear tape. Sometimes fun is more apparent in hindsight, telling others about it, or revisiting the pleasure of a small triumph. Type Two Fun captures what many museums do well that visitors enjoy and remember.

§  Being mesmerized by the slow movement of a giant pendulum or wave action in a huge wave tank

§  Doing something we don’t usually get to do: seeing a giant fossil up close; climbing to the top of a lighthouse

§  Keeping a copter hovering in a wind column for an extended period of time because of a particularly clever design

§  Pulling off an impressive building project of cardboard construction or Keva Planks with others

§  The Grossology exhibit exploring the science in the human body and its many and sometimes messing, amusing, and impolite expressions  

Type Three Fun is situated in the rich and meaningful experiences of challenge and complexity and related feelings of deep satisfaction. Unlike the immediate burst of happiness of Type One Fun, engaging in Type Three Fun involves an awareness that something is both enjoyable in the present and meaningful beyond it. Playing with ideas, being inventive, watching a family member accomplish something difficult, and being in the presence of something extraordinary create powerful moments that delight, transfix, and lift the spirit. The social aspect of fun also has a presence in Type Three Fun, when we work with others towards a common goal, connect with someone around a powerful experience, or share personal stories.

National Museum of Mathematics
(Photo credit: Vergeront)

Of course, not everything is fun. Museums present stories with unhappy endings, feature events with tragic outcomes, and ask hard questions with no easy answers. Finding a delicate balance of content, compelling approach, opportunity for reflection, and making meaning can create a moment of lightness, beauty. And sometimes humor is the best way to make the unbearable bearable.  

Museum examples of Type Three Fun reflect the complexity and opportunity of challenging topics that many visitors find rewarding.

§  National Museum of Mathematics offers insights into puzzles, patterns, and the beauty of structures—surprises and fun for some—while anxiety producing for others

§  Climate change, a complex topic that is difficult to grapple with, can be explored through stunning representations of changes that are occurring, distressing future scenarios, and playful experimentation with airflow

§  Body Worlds navigates topics of healthcare and anatomy with the strange and sometimes disturbing beauty of dissected human bodies

§  Mining the Museum, Fred Wilson’s 1992 installation at the Maryland Historical Society, juxtaposed slave shackles and a whipping post with beautiful, elegant 19^th century objects

§  Race: Are We So Different both looks at the complex topic of human variation and celebrates our differences

Playing with Fun

Museums are unlikely to make everything over-the-top fun. Yet, they can give fun an honored presence and create an intentional experiential mix that brings together all types of fun to serve and connect with their wide range of visitors. When they are attuned to dimensions of the three types of fun, museums can create more openings for fun.

Along with sharing elements of humor, playfulness, or enjoyment, the three types of fun also take place in a physical context, are social, and involve engagement.

Fun’s origins are varied, subtle, and sometimes surprising. They include intellectual wit and nonsense; hyperbole and drollery; incongruity and spontaneity; the whacky, the weird, and the wonderful. Fun can emerge from an off-kilter take on a subject, something amazing we can’t do anywhere else, and something utterly familiar and daily.   

The physical context in which fun is situated, matters: objects, materials, scale, environmental features, views, and adjacencies. A zoo might place a bench for watching animal antics. A museum might place a mirror over head for a surprising view. A ridiculous theme like a carnival may be the backdrop for outer space exploration. What about Morning yoga in the Asian galleries or sculpture park?

Fun requires a friendly setting where people feel welcome, come together, and are available to enjoy the moment. Museums are just those kinds of places. Feeling a sense of connection to others feels good. Laughter and smiles are contagious. Remembering a happy time with friends casts a warm glow. At the same time, fun and indifference do not mix. Each type of fun requires some effort, some investment. We must be paying attention, imagining, making connections, choosing, listening, remembering, taking photos, taking a risk...if we want to have fun.

What kinds of fun do visitors find and enjoy at your museum?

Stakeholder Engagement Audit

Originally posted in March 2014

In gearing up for a strategic planning project, I start thinking about some of the usual planning steps and how they might be charged to do more work both as a part of the planning, as well as in moving the museum forward.

Every museum has stakeholders whether or not it recognizes them, serves them well, or enlists them in the life of the museum and community. Stakeholders are the people, groups, constituencies, and institutions who are likely to affect or be affected by a museum, its vision, plans, or projects. Not every museum is deliberate about identifying, understanding and engaging its stakeholders; some approach stakeholder engagement in a generic way, without considering stakeholders and their interests in relation to the museum and its interests. This is a missed opportunity.

Along with many museums, over the years I have expanded my view and appreciation of stakeholders, ways of engaging them, relating that engagement to the museum’s long-term strategic interests, and integrating stakeholders into the museum’s culture.

Especially when a museum anticipates significant change, careful examination of its stakeholders is critical. Strategic planning is an opportunity for a museum to think realistically and deeply about its stakeholders as it sets its future course. In preparing for a major expansion–an addition, renovation, new construction, or relocation– a museum must think about expanding its stakeholders and how to activate them around its vision. 

A stakeholder engagement audit advances a museum in becoming more magnetic like the museums described by Anne Bergeron and Beth Tuttle in Magnetic: The Art and Science of Engagement. In all these situations, a stakeholder engagement audit involves the museum in listening and responding to and being inclusive of its closest partners.

Stakeholder Engagement Audit At-a-Glance

A stakeholder engagement audit is a deliberate process for studying the individuals and groups across the community who share the museum’s interests and value its work and how it involves them. Strictly speaking, this is not a plan, but it does guide planning and decisions across the museum. Through gathering information, identifying common and consistent themes, and framing initiatives, the audit assists the museum in activating a stakeholder community around a compelling idea with positive outcomes.

Each museum has its own particular emphasis for a stakeholder engagement audit: widening its circle of stakeholders, better understanding community organizations, becoming more relationship based, or sustaining involvement. Depending on how formal or extensive the audit is, it can be done by an in-house team, strategic planners as part of their scope, or a firm specializing in this work. And, whether a museum takes this on in a big or small way, doing it is more important than doing it in a particular way. Conducting a stakeholder engagement audit addresses four broad questions.

• How does the museum currently view its stakeholders and how does it engage them?

• Around what significant, strategic idea does the museum hope to engage its stakeholders?

• What can the museum learn about its stakeholders to serve them and enlist their interests?

• How can the museum move forward by activating a stakeholder community?

How does the museum currently view its stakeholders are and how does it engage them? A practical starting step is developing a current and realistic picture of the museum’s stakeholder engagement. This background work looks at the stakeholders, both internal and external, who are engaged with the museum and benefit from its efforts. Board, funders, members, and visitors usually lead the list, but there are also partners, policy makers and gatekeepers. Push for 360º engagement. Stakeholders with shared interests who don’t (yet) fit in an obvious group can be carried forward: advisors or research partners from past projects or vendors and service providers with related interests. Capture regional and national as well as local stakeholders.

As part of identifying current stakeholder groups, the museum will also note how it currently serves and engages them through events, activities, communication, benefits, etc. Keep track of these along with opportunities for increasing their involvement at each step. Typically, this set of discussions shifts between what the museum currently does and what it could do in the future. The museum may gain insights in exploring what stakeholders of peer organizations look like–a museum of comparable size in its city or another city. This can introduce fresh perspectives including new ways to look at, cluster, and engage stakeholders.

In wanting to activate a stakeholder community around a compelling idea, a museum must explore the significant idea–or ideas–around which it currently engages them. Typically this is the mission, a slogan, or what the museum considers to be its brand. Often this conversation reveals that the museum lacks clarity around the set of ideas and what it represents or it has a limited way of talking about them.  

Around what significant, strategic idea does the museum hope to engage its stakeholders?

Most museums know that its stakeholders are motivated by its focus, track record, the population it serves, or personal relationships with top leaders. But most museums are not clear about what, in particular, this means given its community, mission, audience, and peer institutions.

Clarity about its own public value precedes communicating it and aligning around it. A compelling, strategic idea that is more than a slogan serves the stakeholder audit directly; it is also critical in making the museum’s case for support, coordinating messages internally, writing grants, hiring the right staff, and achieving museum-wide alignment.

Perhaps memorable and succinct, a tagline is generally not sufficiently compelling to activate and engage groups of stakeholders. It neither lends itself to a powerful agenda nor gives the museum traction to be a catalyst for action. Generally museums must look deeper into what they bring to their communities that others also recognize and value. A compelling idea is often located at the convergence of: the mission and vision with which it currently engages stakeholders; emergent opportunities pursued with greater rigor; and community priorities.

A helpful discussion at this point focuses on how the interests it shares with stakeholders could be more focused and relevant. Stakeholder interest might be framed around: strong families; learning through play; connecting art and the creative processes; transformative experiences through art; children’s potential; or authentic experiences related to place.

Realistically, most museums will refine this focus throughout the audit process itself: starting with an idea, framing questions for stakeholders, listening for what’s important to them, and following themes and threads. If a museum is fortunate, this work will continue beyond the audit because more staff will be attuned to big, resonating ideas that connect with stakeholders.

What can the museum learn about its stakeholders to serve them and enlist their interests? Now, get ready to listen to stakeholders and think about the relationship between them and the museum.

Individual interviews and facilitated conversations incorporate stakeholder perspectives and convey the museum’s willingness to listen. While there is no set number or mix of interviews, clearly, not all interviewees should be insiders-board, staff, and good friends. Varied perspectives and voices, including outliers, generate the rich information and new insights capable of providing strong direction. Typically these interviews are not confidential so interviewers can be selected based on warmth, clarity about the purpose and message, and good listening.

Face-to-face interviews and group conversations are opportunities for understanding how the museum’s strategic idea resonates with stakeholders; whether it is clearly expressed; and how it is meaningful to them. The museum will also hear how stakeholders see themselves as partners; who they view as other stakeholders and why; how much engagement they are interested in; what a fulfilling relationship involves; and the degree and source of the museum’s credibility in its area.

Organizing and distilling information from the interviews occurs in successive steps, looking at groups and approaches; themes; strengths and challenges. Forming stakeholder groups is more than sorting by demographic or external attributes. It involves finding and articulating meaningful distinctions among groups related to mutual interests, shared connections, and preferences for engagement so the similarities within and differences between the groups are easier to see and plan for.

Clustering stakeholder groups by internal (staff and board) and external stakeholders (i.e. visitors, members, community-based partners, civic leaders, donors, media, peers, gatekeepers) is a good first sort. Readiness to play with clusters, however, helps find meaningful groups and a manageable number. Interview material and the museum’s strategic idea for engagement are tools for customizing groups around relevant and specific interests. For instance, every museum has enthusiasts, but a museum may find designating enthusiasts for the riverfront is helpful. 

Interviews also reveal recurring themes such as a lack of clarity about the museum’s strategic idea, other community priorities, perception of the museum’s track record, concern about advocacy, or interest in the work of peer institutions. These themes can add definition to stakeholder groups, inform communication, or help shape engagement.

In effect, the interviews have tested the museum’s strategic vision and how compelling and clear it is for the stakeholders it hopes will invest in it with interest, time, and resources. This feedback should guide the museum in strengthening the idea, making it more tangible or relevant, or sharpening intended outcomes.

How can the museum move forward by activating a stakeholder community? Museums typically view stakeholder engagement as broad categories of involvement supported by a variety of activities and events. Participation occurs through visiting, volunteering, and attending events; learning through training, web content, or accessing resources; sharing through word-of-mouth, media coverage, or social media; support through funding or endorsing; and networking by opening doors, or social media. While stakeholder involvement very likely presents itself as these activities, activating a stakeholder community is more than assigning stakeholder groups to types of involvement.  

Developing a strategic-level framework can help the museum consolidate the audit’s information and insights and integrate it into its work. The framework also helps build alignment among its strategic idea, approaches to serving and enlisting stakeholders, and the internal capacity needed to support stakeholder engagement. A framework might include:

An institutional statement of the museum’s strategic idea around which it intends to activate stakeholders. This becomes helpful in messaging to stakeholder groups.

A working definition of stakeholder engagement. Consistent with the museum’s strategic idea, it also identifies what stakeholder engagement helps accomplish for the museum, and highlights characteristics of the museum’s approach to stakeholder engagement, such as relationship-based, interactive, reciprocity; etc.

Three-to-four stakeholder initiatives for serving, engaging, and enlisting stakeholders. Initiatives focus on how the museum will activate engagement: opportunities it will provide; how it intends to build and sustain relationships and retain stakeholders; and the benefits it hopes to give and receive. A single initiative may involve multiple stakeholder groups.

A logic model for each initiative to lay-out activities, resources, and short and long-term outcomes. A logic model also helps adjust the museum’s internal capacity to support, implement, and monitor stakeholder engagement considering: needed expertise, responsibility for implementation, coordination, communication channels, digital resources, etc. The logic models become action plans for stakeholder engagement and tools for monitoring progress.

Just More Work?

Is an audit just more work or does it put a museum ahead strategically? Museums can’t do well for themselves or their communities without investing in their stakeholders. Any time a museum focuses on its stakeholders thoughtfully, from a variety of perspectives, and in the context of long-term interests, it will be better off. There are other benefits as well. A stakeholder engagement audit can give a sense of how large and active the museum’s base of support is; surface new questions to explore about its stakeholders; identify new stakeholder groups; strengthen relationships with stakeholder groups; and identify stakeholder activities to drop because they are not valuable.

Related Posts

• Stakeholders + Engagement 

• Stakeholder Mapping

• Audience, An Area of Enduring Focus

• Public Value: From Good Intentions to Good

Stakeholder Mapping

Originally posted February 2011

  
Every museum I know has a long list of partners critical to reaching its audiences, delivering solid content, getting its message out, and raising funds. Among the partners, friends, supporters, and sponsors are schools, arts organizations, media, libraries, business clubs and social clubs, community centers, colleges and universities, and hospitals.

While having lots of partners is considered a standard, if not best, practice, few museums have a shared, systematic, and strategic way of knowing, and managing them. At best, a museum has a working list of its partners. Maybe it has a list of partners and constituents pulled together for interviews and focus groups early in its strategic planning process. More likely a museum has a mixed-media creation of lists of active (and dormant) partners, current sponsors, a few paragraphs from grant proposals, and a roster of advisors scattered across 5 or 6 offices.

Regardless of how they are organized or referred to, partners, sponsors, advisors, and friends are among a museum’s stakeholders: the people, groups, constituencies, and institutions who are likely to affect or be affected by a museum, its plans, or projects. 

When a museum plans a major project such as an expansion or a new facility, these stakeholders and their interests count. Sometimes, a stakeholder analysis is used to understand the likely effect of a proposed project on them. A practical stakeholder-mapping tool that I have used with several museums is helpful in carrying out the stakeholder analysis for an entire museum. These six basic steps for stakeholder mapping are expanded below. Stakeholder mapping:

• Identifies the museum’s internal and external stakeholders;
• Clusters stakeholders with similar interests;
• Characterizes the nature of their interest in the museum;
• Represents stakeholder groups in relation to one another and the museum;
• Develops stakeholder messages to guide and align communication; and
• Selects approaches to stakeholder engagement.

Identify the museum’s internal and external stakeholders. Bring out the lists of existing partners, supporters and friends, both individuals and groups that are likely to affect or be affected by the museum. Think about partners that are programmatic, project, or strategic; that are local, national, or international. This is not a brainstorming exercise to make a longer list, but an exercise to make a better list. Consider stakeholders from across sectors such as health, arts, business, media, and education. Be sure to add internal stakeholders including staff, trustees, volunteers, members, and the museum’s audience. You will have a mix of specific people and groups (museum members, the Public Housing Authority, the Chamber of Commerce, etc.) and categories (private schools, parks, etc.). Once the list is fairly complete, review it, talk about who’s on it—and who's not on it, but should be. Think about stakeholders who could be in more than one group; are superintendents “education leaders” or “educators”? 

• Move on when the list of internal and external stakeholders relates to the museum’s accomplishing its work and reflects the community.

Cluster stakeholders with similar interests. Begin the big sort. Think about the needs, concerns, wants, and authority of stakeholders. How do these interests converge with the museum’s? This question helps connect the museum’s benefit to the stakeholder’s interests and brings, at least modestly, an external perspective on these relationships. Create about 5-7 stakeholder groups based on similar interests within a group and on distinct interests between groups. Focus especially on  groups that share strong interests with one another. More extensive and detailed analysis of stakeholders is possible, but not necessary or probably realistic. Still, this is a good point to ask what additional information the museum should have about stakeholder groups to understand and engage with them more effectively. 

• A typical stakeholder group might be staff, board, and volunteers.
• Move on when most or all of the stakeholders fit into 5-7 groups.

Characterize the nature of their interest in the museum. Working with the preliminary clusters, focus on the nature of each stakeholder group’s interest. These are likely to be relationship based, and are less likely to follow existing partnership categories such as programmatic or media. Stakeholders might cluster around an interest in increasing access and providing opportunities; being advocates or champions; or simply being “wonderful friends.” Make meaningful distinctions among the interests of all the groups. Since clustering stakeholders is related to the interests they share, revisiting clusters may be helpful. Some shifting of specific people or groups from one cluster to another is to be expected. 

• A stakeholder group might be the “Museum Team” including board, staff, committees and task forces, and volunteers. The interest of the Museum Team could be: contributing personal interest and expertise to advance the museum's long-term purpose. 
• Move on when the stakeholder groups feel firm and identifiable, their interests are explicit, and they have names based on their interests.

• Represent stakeholder groups in relation to one another and to the museum. Assess the possible impact of each stakeholder group on the museum and the museum’s impact on that group. Think of sorting stakeholders according to primary or secondary groups by assessing the impact, or influence, of the interest. Roughly characterizing the size or intensity of the impact is one approach. Locate each stakeholder group in one circle of a set of concentric circles according to their impact: greater impact closer to the center. This is an opportunity for lively discussion on where stakeholder groups should be placed and why. Should the museum’s core team or its audience be at the center? A variation in this step is for several small working groups to each locate stakeholder groups on the map; then compare and discuss. 

•  In the Museum Team example, this group is placed at the center of the stakeholder map because its interests are inextricably linked to the museum. This group has the most responsibility and greatest impact on the museum. 
• Move on when stakeholder groups have been located on the map.

 Develop stakeholder messages to guide and align communication. With stakeholder groups formed around their interest, named, and mapped, try composing a message to highlight their significance to the museum. Messages convey a high value on all stakeholder groups; they provide guidance and consistency across the organization for approaching and interacting with members of stakeholder groups. Be clear, complete, and concise. Try to frame the message for each group in parallel ways. Consider voice; the message might be in the second person, “Your ,…” 

• In the Museum Team example, its message is, ”Your skills, expertise, perspectives, and commitments shape and improve the museum’s thinking, practices, and offerings and expand its resources.” 
• Move on when a message has been composed for each group.

Select approaches to stakeholder engagement. A stakeholder map could simply be a diagram if it didn’t point to actively and intentionally engaging  strategic group members on behalf of their, and the museum’s own, mutual interests. The last step focuses on developing and strengthening relationships between the museum and its stakeholder groups, and their members. Engagement strategies work to benefit both the group and the museum and draw on what the museum already does well in interacting with a group. Going forward, a museum’s plans, strategic and project, annual development, program, and marketing plans, should reflect an understanding of the stakeholder groups. Using the engagement strategies from the stakeholder map, each plan lays out specific ways to connect with stakeholder groups critical to the plan's success. 

• Before moving on, think about how to make this tool even more useful to the museum's purposes. For instance, could setting a target or outcome for each stakeholder group help?

A Few Tips on Process

• If possible, set the stakeholder mapping in a larger context: the museum’s strategic planning, gearing up for an expansion, reorganizing the museum's structure, branding the museum, etc.
• Bring together a mapping team of about 7 people from across the museum.
• Plan on 2-3 sessions of 1-1/2 to 2 hours over several weeks. Extending much beyond that could end the process.
• Between sessions, share the mapping process with staff; incorporate their knowledge of stakeholders and build ownership.
• The mapping team  might find itself weeding out stakeholders at any step. Early on individuals or groups who are listed might turn out to be inconsequential. In firming up the groups, ask whether these are key stakeholder groups and individuals within them.

• When completed, share the stakeholder map with all staff and with the board. Walk them through the purpose, the process, and how departments and teams can and will be expected to use it.
• Members of the mapping team should conscientiously use and refer to the stakeholder map to help themselves and others across the museum internalize it. 

Map It

Museums have and need stakeholders. To accomplish their goals and serve their communities well, museums must know and grow the individuals and groups who share and influence their interests. While museums are interested in increasing their stakeholders, expanding the variety, and cultivating relationships with them, they also must be concerned with managing them in targeted and strategic ways that are respectful of a stakeholder’s time and interest and also protect the museum’s image and resources. Stakeholder mapping is one tool. If you have used a different tool to manage your museum’s stakeholders, please share it. If you use stakeholder mapping, please share how it has worked for you.

Taking Stock of Stakeholders

Originally posted in October 2016, Taking Stock of Stakeholders starts a series of 4 posts on museum stakeholders.

Photo credit: FreePik

In virtually every museum planning workshop or project I’m involved with, phrases like, ... collaboration is in our DNA, ... with our long-term strategic partners, ... connecting with diverse communities, ... we're about developing relationships, and ... community engagement are part of the discussion and they are plentiful.

Whether in strategic planning, master planning, fundraising, friend-raising, or transition planning for a museum that is starting up, expanding, or reinventing itself, words and phrases referencing stakeholders seem to have a noticeably high profile. From one museum project to another, the particular community context and specific partners’ names do change. In some museums stakeholders are clearly identified and in others, actual recognition of groups as stakeholders has not yet come into full focus. Museums, however, are not only talking about their stakeholder more, but they are integrating them into planning in more ways and in more strategic ways. 

Stakeholders are the people, groups, constituencies, and institutions who are likely to affect or be affected by a museum, its vision, plans, or projects; who invest in the museum and in whom the museum invests.

Every museum has stakeholders whether or not it recognizes them, serves them well, or engages them effectively. From my experience, museums’ awareness of and value on their stakeholders seems to be expanding. I sense a move from a rather generic view of undifferentiated groups as “the community” to a view of invested stakeholders with better defined interests and deserving a more prominent and intentional role in partnership with the museum. With this shift, the likelihood of groups, individuals, and constituencies actually playing a more active and influential role in the life of the museum also increases.   

Several factors seem to be converging to give stakeholders greater prominence in museums’ planning and work. Museums are responding to voices inside and outside that view them as having a responsibility to serve their community fully. The expectation is of increasing access to resources and to the social benefits that help create a stronger community.

Viewing its position in and responsibility towards its community in new ways expands a museum’s perspective on relating to its stakeholders. No longer satisfied with casual connections, a museum looks to cultivating sustainable relationships with stakeholders that are long term, mutually satisfying, and negotiated. They recognize the assets of families, museum neighbors, school partners, members, and underrepresented communities, and marginalized groups.

These shifts generate new questions about what authentic engagement is from the stakeholder's perspective; new ways the museum might facilitate informal interactions around meeting others and learning; and the nature of connections built out into the community. A museum becomes more attuned to common interests, building a sense of shared identity around those interests, and framing mutually satisfying goals. This work inevitably uncovers new opportunities to bring groups and individuals into processes earlier, whether planning a new museum, developing an exhibition plan, or creating a community engagement framework. Some tools and processes for understanding and engaging stakeholders focus on and assist in this work.

• Stakeholder Mapping. Museums have and need stakeholders to accomplish their goals and serve their communities well. Stakeholder mapping is one tool that assists museums in knowing and understanding the individuals and groups who share and influence their interests.

• Stakeholder Engagement Audit. Museums can’t do well for themselves or their communities without investing in their stakeholders. A stakeholder engagement audit can convey how large and active the museum’s stakeholder base is; point to new stakeholder groups and ways to strengthen relationships with them; and reveal stakeholder activities that are not relevant.

• Stakeholder + Engagement. Authentic engagement has the potential to add another meaning to “friending" the museum. Expectations are high for engagement that is frequent, accessible, customized, and satisfying. Every museum should have multiple answers to, “what are meaningful ways to engage our stakeholder groups?”

Significant work still needs to be done to further develop these and other tools and processes for engaging the diverse stakeholders every museum hopes to serve in meaningful ways. Preparation for engaging stakeholders necessarily starts long before a museum plans a program, holds an event, crafts its messages, or greets its friends at the door and continues long after a visit, an encounter, or a connection. 

Serving the Museum's Full Age Range

Originally posted December 2012. Magical thinking is not a successful strategy for serving the upper (or lower) end of a museum's age range. Learning from and about those age groups and what engages them can be.

When one museum tackles a big question about serving their audience, I am likely to hear audience in many other questions museums are considering. In multiple master planning sessions, on conference calls, and pouring over marketing studies, the focus on serving the upper end of a museum’s age range comes through again and again. 

Like all museums, children’s museums struggle with how to serve the full range of their intended audience. Their more specific challenge is how to serve the upper end of their target age range and whether to serve children 7 or 8 years to 10 years, tweens, and youth at all. This dance, shared by many museums, has a long history with many variations.

At one time children’s museums opened their doors to welcome children 3 - 12 years old, their parents and caregivers. Children 3 - 6 years arrived, returned, and began owning the museum. With time, many children’s museums rethought their audience and offerings and often landed on serving newborns - 8 year olds, occasionally targeting children up to 10 years. This change, it seems, brought younger children to the museums. More 2 year olds showed up as well as loyal 3 - 6 year olds. Wanting to expand their audience, accommodate families with children of several ages, serve the community well, and sometimes responding to internal pressure to “own” a wider niche, some children’s museums pushed on serving 7-10  and even 12 year olds.

Evidence supports decisions to serve a younger audience and topping out, for instance, at about 6 years. Concern about the skills gap has meant more communities now offer universal pre-K. More 4 year olds are spending more of their day in school with less time for weekday visits to the children’s museum. Elementary schools are cutting budgets and classroom time for anything but teaching to standards and tests. School group attendance that draws children 5-6 years and older is dropping. Out-of-school hours are filled with after-school out-of-home care , with sports, scouts. and music lessons. Growing competition among science, history, and art museums for 6-12 year olds in family and school groups is also impacting attendance. Finally, some children’s museums seem to feel resigned to losing the upper end of their target age, citing KAGOY–kids are getting older younger–and the “boo” factor–bigger children don’t want to be around younger children.  

On the other hand, the lower end of the age range, newborn to 2 years, is fairly secure for children’s museums. Parents with infants and toddlers have fewer options of places where their very young children are truly planned for and welcome. These parents are also strong, sometimes very strong, advocates for their needs and those of their babies: nursing spaces, clean and safe places, less busy times, times with fewer or no big kids. And while art, science, and history museums may be interested in serving 6-12 year olds, serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers is a significantly greater stretch to serve well. Many children’s museums are telling me that they track the average age of their audience and it is dropping. Last week I heard one museum say its average age is 4.5 years. A reasonable decision is to concentrate resources on serving a narrower age group well.

Not So Fast…

Physical challenge in play, part of a healthy childhood

That certainly isn’t the only choice. Before abandoning the upper end of the age range, I would encourage a children’s museum to look hard at the convergence of its strategic interests, the developmental interests of its young audience, and the needs of its families. Children are an audience for many museums. For children’s museums, however, children are more than an audience. They are at the heart of the mission and central to the museum’s reason for being. Children’s museums have become places where children can be children and where they can grow up. They are full of experiences and encounters that enrich millions of childhoods annually. As advocates for healthy and full childhoods, children’s museums have an opportunity, and perhaps a responsibility, to play a major role in stemming the erosion of childhood. The compression of childhood means children suited for play with toys want cell phones. Compression wears away a sense of freedom, safety, and promise that children need for their well-being.

Many parents and grandparents don’t want their children aging up so fast. They want to enjoy their child at each age and stage rather than find themselves saying, “When the children were young,” regretting that time passed unnecessarily quickly. Even children remain attached to their childhoods, at least occasionally. Regrettably lacking a study to back this up, I do have examples from experience: focus group summaries of tweens who are nostalgic about their childhoods and marketing studies citing 11 year olds wanting “lap time” with their parents. In children’s museums I see and listen to 10 and 11 year olds and remember overhearing an 11 year old announce, “I want to do this for a living when I grow-up,” as he pressed his 10^th paper pulp medallion. Museums can make experiences better, much, much better for 7+ year olds by recognizing and responding to parents’ and children’s attachment to childhood.

Holding onto childhood favorites

Any of the 7 year olds we know hover at several points on the developmental spectrum at one time. This is typical. A child may be more like a 5 year old in social development and more like an 8 year old in language development. The broad developmental ranges typical of all children’s development are characteristically greater for children with special needs. A children's museum is a place where an 8 year old  with special needs fits in. These variations expand the picture of the 3, 5, or 7 year old that a museum serves. Differences in children’s background and family experiences also account for variations. What is engaging and challenging to a 6 year old with varied and wide-ranging experiences may be more similar to an 8 year old with limited life experiences. Clear-cut developmental breaks simply do not occur. Even the designations of early childhood (birth-8 years) and middle childhood (6-12 years) overlap. That tells us something. If a museum is planning for 6 year olds, how can it not plan for 10 year olds–who may also enjoy aspects of being 6?

A developmental perspective across the full range of early and middle childhood is invaluable. It shifts the primary focus from chronological ages and grades in school to what is happening for the child. Understanding the full developmental range also means recognizing that it is not prescriptive or predictive. Children's capabilities vary with context, are constantly emerging, and vary across domains. In short we can't follow developmental stages too literally. At the conclusion of a half-day discussion I facilitated with a leadership team to affirm their target age range–newborns through 15 year olds–and how to serve them, one participant noted that serving the age range well means knowing not only where children are developmentally, but also where children are headed developmentally.

Families with children across the age range

Not only are children wonderfully varied, but their families are as well. Many families have children ranging in age from newborn to 10 or 11 years. They want to do things together as a family–in one place. With experiences that engage a 2, 5, and 8 year old and amenities that make it easy for families to explore together, a children’s museum can be family, child, and mission centered.

What other considerations do you find at the convergence of a museum’s strategic interests, the developmental interests of its young audience, and the needs of its families?

Focusing on the Audience

What is interesting to 7 year olds?

By engaging the marketing, developmental and design expertise that has been a hallmark of children’s museums’ growing audience (if perhaps younger audience), a museum could have success serving 7-8 year olds in ways that resemble their success serving 4.5 year olds. This is not the realm of magical thinking and crossing fingers, closing eyes and muttering, “I hope, I hope, I hope they come.” It is the realm of focusing and deepening a museum’s understanding of children 7-10 (or 11 to 12) years; of experimenting, stretching, and revising assumptions about how to serve them. This exploration requires plain thinking and a few guidelines about audience.

• Trying to serve a museum’s full age range is not the same as “aging up” or changing the target audience to  older children. When a museum works to better serve its full age range, it builds on a foundation of serving that audience: attendance data with school group numbers; member and visitor surveys often with age group information; and relationships with members and teachers. An approach to better serving the upper end of the current age range may also be helpful to a museum expanding its age range from, say, 6 years to 8 years or 8 to 10 years–but the starting points differ.

• All parts of a museum’s audience are valued. All must be served well. Here’s the catch: all parts of the audience will not (and can not) have a high presence. An equally high level of services, offerings, programs, and exhibit real estate is not needed for all groups. Groups with a lower presence at the museum, typically the youngest and oldest, should have comparably fewer but still high quality experiences. The 7-10 year old set is in this “older shoulder” group.

• Serving any and all age groups well relies on understanding them well. Get to know 7-10 year olds. Bring varied perspectives and sources of information to this exploration. What do these children say is fascinating to them?  What’s happening for them developmentally? What do their parents say interests them? What do their parents think is wonderful about them? What does the museum do consistently well that other venues do not? Check assumptions about who they are and their interests. Ask them and observe them. Don't guess.

What other considerations of the audience prepare a museum for serving the upper end of its age range?

Getting Started

If serving the upper end of the museum’s targeted age range better is central to mission, attendance, and visitor experience, a deliberate and thoughtful approach is necessary.  By no means comprehensive, the steps below can get a museum started. Lessons from these steps should point to new ones.

Clarify the starting and end points. Decide on the age group to focus on and be specific. Gather information on the number of children in this age range currently served and how: in exhibits? in programs? as members? If no information is available; start counting. A survey may be in order. Also, be clear about what you hope to accomplish with this effort. Is it an increase in the number of children in the age group? If so, what’s a realistic stretch? Is it satisfaction among families with children across the age range? Keeping families as members for longer? Keep in mind that 7-10 year olds flooding exhibits and programs and pushing their share of attendance from 5% to 25% is unlikely. An increased presence could occur gradually as 5 and 6 year olds grow up and stay hooked on museum offerings; as word gets out to more families; and as the museum improves its pitch for older children. 

Get to know the age group. Visit places where children 7-12 years spend time and are engaged in ways the museum hopes to engage them. It may be in your museum, another museum, at the library, park and rec, or Boys and Girls Club. Observe them, listen to what they talk about, notice how they relate to one another. Take notes and photos. Refer to books like Yardsticks by Chip Wood which has a good feel for children 4-14 years and to the Search Institute’s Developmental Assets.

Know your own museum. Take a very good look at where children in the upper end of the age range currently have the highest presence in your museum's exhibits and document it. Observe them; talk to them. Ask what attracts them to the area, what they like about the activity, why, and what else they'd like to do there. Photograph them and what they are doing; make notes. Record numbers of children, ages, and times on a floor plan in the area. Then, build on their interests, responses, and insights. Modify or develop activities and incorporate them into exhibits. Be sure to revisit these areas, observe, and compare before-and-after data. Has the presence, activity, or dwell time of this age group changed? Repeat this process; it may take several rounds to get a good feel for a good match. Apply the approach to programs as well.

Open-ended materials: water, mud and gravel

Rethink spaces with older children in mind. Many museums have spaces designated for infants and toddlers up to 3 or 4 years, both as specific galleries and as “tod pods” in other galleries and exhibits. Seldom used for older children, a designated gallery has both possibilities and challenges. Allocating significant square footage often isn’t justified for a small age cohort. Even when it is justified, identifying experiences that appeal to older children without being a magnet for much younger ones can be a challenge; something that can defeat the purpose. Material intense maker spaces, multi-step processes like stop-action animation, physical challenges requiring coordination, cultural explorations, engineering feats, and creative applications of technology and media are possibilities. These engage the increasing capacity in middle childhood to think abstractly, apply complex problem solving strategies, persist, and use fine motor coordination. 

Tweens area (right) set lower 
than children's area (left)

Targeted age strategies are one approach. Strategies that transcend age are another. Open-ended experiences and materials engage children across the age and developmental spectrum differently. A child’s expanding repertoire of experiences that come with age and development play out differently with build platforms, material explorations, and sensory phenomena such as light and shadow. Design choices can also reinforce these strategies. Adjacencies might locate early child spaces out of first sight at the entry. Changing levels and sight lines can visually separate areas and age groups. Selecting a look-and-feel of spaces to appeal to a broader age range can expand rather than shrink age appeal. 

Taking a cue from children's thinking

Build on strengths. Children across the age range are delightfully curious. Even as babies, children express preferences. As soon as they can talk they share wonderful ideas and make observations. Learning from children and how they think can (and should) happen at any age. With development, however, children enjoy additional capacities to think, imagine, explain, solve problems, and express ideas. In serving the full age range of the museum, take full advantage of these exciting age-related developmental capacities of children 6 and 7 years old and up. These children can draw. They have a wider range of experiences to draw from. They can explain their ideas and use increasingly complex and creative thinking and communication strategies to do so. They can tell you a lot. Perhaps the answer to how to serve children 7 years and up is to ask them.

What strategies have you found that are effective in serving children 6 and 7 years old and older?