Counting Our Impact
This month’s edition of Performance Counts was inspired by our annual Impact Plan for The Associated!
As all our readers know, we take performance and evaluation very seriously here at JMM – whether its assessing the success of our exhibits, tracking our reach within schools, or documenting our efforts to train the next generation of museum professionals – it’s important to us that our work make an impact. Performance Counts itself is a newsletter dedicated to sharing all kinds of evaluation information with our JMM family.
As an agency of The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore, every year we also share an impact plan with our colleagues, to help everyone understand some of our key performance statistics and goals. We thought our readers would enjoy seeing this year’s report!
Any time we are talking about performance and evaluation, its important to keep our Mission at top of mind, which for us is centered around connection, inspiration, and action. You’ll notice that all three of the impacts we selected to report on tie directly into these core tenets while giving a snapshot of different parts of our Museum program (exhibits, education, and collections).
Impact 1: Provide curious people with experiences that create memories and invite them to turn those memories into actions.
We have been surveying visitors about how their knowledge of the scrap industry grew after visiting the exhibit. As you can see from the horizontal bar graph above, everyone reported knowing at least a little bit about the industry after exploring Scrap Yard, with the most popular response was that visitors know “more than average” after their visit.
We also asked exhibit visitors if they were inspired to make any changes in their lives based on their experience in Scrap Yard – two-thirds of our respondents answered positively, and many of those who answered “no” followed up with comments that they already recycle at home or work.
Scrap Yard is also the first exhibit to include our Upstander volunteering opportunities and partnerships from opening day, including highlighting those offerings in the exhibit guidebook. More than one-third of our surveyed visitors reported a positive intention towards engaging with our Upstander opportunities. And much like our recyclers above, there were many comments from visitors that they already participated in the listed (or similar) volunteering opportunities.
Impact 2: Engender cross-cultural understanding to build an empathetic community.
Both of the graphs above track the increase in our reach – on the left you can see the rise in number of students served, broken down by type of school (public, Jewish, independent). We are thrilled that we saw year-over-year increases in all three categories. On the right we’ve captured the increase in the reach of our educator training efforts – due, in no small part, to our Winter Teachers Institute, which just successfully completed its second iteration.
Impact 3: Use the power of the “authentic” to inspire Jewish Marylanders to explore their roots and provide global access to the Maryland Jewish story.
The graph on the left tracks our visitorship by calendar year – it’s interesting to map the peaks to specific events and activities at JMM. The big jump in our general attendance coincides perfectly with our blockbuster Inescapable exhibit about America’s first superstar, Harry Houdini. While that particular spike is an outlier, we are always happy to see the steady growth and maintenance of our visitorship, especially in the face of some reporting in recent years about the impending demise of museums.
On the right are some quick figures related to our archival collections. Our archivist, Lorie Rombro, has made great strides in her time to-date. Ask any museum professional and they will tell you that providing access to historical collections is one of the most important things a museum can do to help connect individuals to the stories of our past, place, and communities. From over 1,100 images identified for the Centennial celebration of the Associated, to helping 20 different individuals and families find new information about their ancestors, the contribution of our archivist is priceless.
To close our impact plan report, we shared these illuminating quotes from a few different spheres:
“…for anyone who is fascinated with this master of the mysterious.” – AAA World Magazine
“the museum remains the locus of Baltimore Jewish identity and offers a portal to the world where that identity took root.” — Goldstein and Weiner, On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore
“What a pleasure – and what a treasure! Thank you so much.” – German teacher, Herr Manfred Brosamle-Lambrecht, whose students used JMM holdings in their exploration of Holocaust survivors.
“I was quite taken up with the whole experience. I know the students were, as well. Through their unique questions and their quiet moments of reflection, I am positive the experience for them was just as enriching and meaningful.” – Nina Riggs, MD State Department of Ed
We encourage you to share with us what YOU would say our greatest impact is – drop us an email or share your thoughts on our Facebook or Twitter feeds!