CHI Consultation Workshops

Exploring CHIs

Phase 5 of 5

Third consultation workshops - NEMO 2021-11-05 - 2021-11-19

Process phases

Back to list

Sarah Smith - Impact Manaager

William Parker-Jenkins

05/11/2021 12:20

Kind of organisation (eg museum, archive, ...): History Museum
Role or Job in Organization: Audience engagement, measuring impact of museum activities with target audiences
Main goals at work: - Assess and advise on museum activities to ensure they actually create an impact on target audiences.
- This is therefore a managerial post, sitting above several departments, with the ability to discuss and tweak actions, to ensure engagement and impact.
- For example, adding a call to action or explicit user behaviour outcome, to content and activities created for external audiences. These actions can be collected and analysed digitally.
- In other words, making sure the museum's activities have a useful impact, measuring this in both a quantitative and qualitative sense, and feeding it back to inform future activities of the museum.
- Why does this post not exist already? Due to the silo effect of department's work; due to sensitivities and a lack of 'mandate' or authority to tweak the output of these departments' work; due to lack of integrated data and monitoring at a holistic/360 level; due to a lack of clear targets (what does success actually look like?), incentives for the overall organisation to actually reach these targets, or for individuals to reach these targets (akin to sales targets).
Who do you need to collaborate with?: Internally - collections, curators, learning & events, communications, legal, management.
Externally - appropriate networks to amplify these actions, and provide expert advice on fulfilling them.
Externally - consultants to unblock or turbo-charge certain actions.
Concerns/wishes on digital strategy:: - Digital strategy would need some form of workshops first, to attain buy-in from various departments that this type of Impact Manager post is the new normal, that each department's work is by nature part of an overall digital strategy and may need to be tweaked accordingly.
- New processes to digitise work processes - e.g. creating metadata in a standardised format, uploading metrics into a standardised platform, regular review meetings to assess progress, and take steps accordingly.
- Potential new supporting posts may need to be created (and are thus highlighted in the digital strategy) that again change or sit above standard positions e.g. Audience Development Officer for researching impact in various audience segments, analysing available data, identifying which audiences are not being reached, or which forms of new data streams are required.