Arts, Culture, and Museums

Hello! I’m Lauren Holley, the Audience and Evaluation Specialist at Space Center Houston. I work with our full organization; as our first in-house evaluator, I am shaping colleagues’ perspectives of evaluation and embedding accountability, iterative improvement, and focus on outcomes into our offerings. Our greatest and broadest offering is our general visitor experience. With consistent …

ACM TIG Week: Building Staff Evaluative Thinking (and a Pyramid) with a Guest Needs Hierarchy by Lauren Holley Read More »

We are Patricia Montaño, Megan Littrell, and Anne Gold from CIRES Education & Outreach at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Claire Ratcliffe Adams and Brooks Mitchell from the National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL) at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. We collaborate on the We are Water project to design informal Science, …

ACM TIG Week: Collaborating with Practitioners to Create Relevant Instruments to Measure Library Staff Capacity for Informal Learning Activities by Patricia Montaño, Megan Littrell, Anne Gold, Claire Ratcliffe Adams, & Brooks Mitchell Read More »

Greetings! We are Emily Kalnicky & Kathryn Owen, members of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ (AZA) Social Science Research and Evaluation Scientific Advisory Group (SSRE SAG). Following up on yesterday’s post, today we will highlight two of the five research questions from the agenda and opportunities for possible collaboration. Example: Social emotional and physical …

ACM TIG Week: A Research Agenda for Zoos and Aquariums (and Beyond) Part 2 by Emily Kalnicky & Kathryn Owen Read More »

Greetings! We are Emily Kalnicky & Kathryn Owen, members of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ (AZA) Social Science Research and Evaluation Scientific Advisory Group (SSRE SAG). Kathryn founded the audience research department at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, and currently consults with nonprofits in the museum and wildlife conservation sectors. Emily is the Director of …

ACM TIG Week: A Research Agenda for Zoos and Aquariums (and Beyond) Part 1 by Emily Kalnicky & Kathryn Owen Read More »

     Hi. I’m Patricia Moore Shaffer, Research & Analysis Deputy Director of the National Endowment for the Arts and served as the 2020 President of the Washington Evaluators. In my role as the agency’s internal evaluator, I began working with the Arts Endowment’s Our Town grant program team in 2016. The Our Town program supports creative placemaking …

ACM TIG Week: Evaluating Creative Placemaking by Patricia Moore Shaffer Read More »

Hi! We are Susan Foutz, director of research and evaluation at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and Bethany Thomas, vice president of programs and education engagement at the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites. Our museums are two of the twelve Indiana cultural institutions participating in the Access Pass program. Access Pass provides low-cost admission …

ACM TIG Week: Supporting Access to Museums through Evaluation by Susan Foutz & Bethany Thomas Read More »