RK&A offers customized planning services for museums, including organizational planning, program and exhibition planning, and evaluation planning.  Our planning work is driven by demands on museums to do more with less while providing clear proof of impact. 

Impact Planning Project

An organizational planning project with a natural history museum

Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture
Seattle, WA

Our approach focuses on achieving impact.

We recognize the time has come for museums to focus on achieving and measuring results in the communities they serve.  Articulating the result, or intended impact, of a museum’s work is responsible given accountability demands.  Intended impact also can be a guidepost empowering museum staff to make effective, purposeful decisions.  In our planning projects, we convey to museum leaders and staff on the importance and value of impact-driven work. 

Our approach emphasizes organizational and professional development.

We lead customized workshops as the foundation to our planning work, providing professional and organizational development around the concept of achieving impact.  Our intent is to simultaneously strengthen individual professionals and the whole organization.   As a result, the museum’s leadership and staff are empowered to work collaboratively and fuel change for a new, impact-driven way of working.

RK&A leads planning services and workshops in the following areas:

Organizational & Strategic Planning: We lead organization-wide planning projects, including strategic planning, preparing for expansion, and strategic retreats, that are customized based on the museum’s organizational goals.  For more information, please see our Pursing Impact workshop brochure [170KB PDF] and Strategic Retreat overview. [118KB PDF]

Program & Exhibition Planning: We help museum practitioners develop goals and objectives that provide a framework for planning and executing evaluation.  We offer the following workshop:

Planning Exhibitions and Programs with the End in Mind

Evaluation Planning: We help museums plan and build capacity for evaluation.  We offer the following workshops:

Developing Rubrics to Measure Impact

Evaluation 101

Evaluation 201

We recently conducted planning projects with the following museums.

Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle, WA

Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC

The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY