Arts, Culture, and Museums
Sarah Lee (she/her/hers)
Principal
Sarah Lee Consulting
Arlington, Massachusetts, United States
Hannah Ridenour LaFrance, MA Museology
Research Manager
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Location: Room 205
In 2020, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), with generous support from a Museums Empowered grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, launched a project titled, “Expanding Data Literacy at the CMA.” The chief purpose of this project was to ensure that the evaluation work being done at CMA was useful to and used by staff across the museum — from educators to curators, guest services to executive leadership. Instead of focusing solely on how evaluation staff could change their own practices, the project team set out to investigate what their colleagues need in order to be better consumers of evaluation findings: what knowledge and skills they need to take full advantage of the evaluation work being done at CMA, and what broader organizational practices could be put in place to create the conditions for rich and robust evaluation use. In this Roundtable, presenters will provide an overview of what was learned during an internal assessment of the museum’s culture of evaluation use, including common barriers among CMA staff to data literacy and the successful practice of evaluation use and data-informed decision-making. Presenters will also describe the professional development resources that were provided for museum staff to date, including a six-session series of workshops designed to help non-evaluators engage meaningfully and thoughtfully with evaluation findings. Attendees will engage in a dialogue about how CMA is building on this work in the years to come to continue to cultivate a strong culture of evaluation use within CMA.