RK&A offers customized impact planning services for museums, including organizational and strategic 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. 

Strategic Plan for Evaluation
[2010]

An evaluation planning project with a children’s museum

Chicago Children’s Museum
Chicago, IL

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 planning. 

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 impact 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].

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

Planning for Results

Evaluation Planning: We help museums develop evaluation strategic plans as well as build capacity for evaluation.  We offer the following workshops:

Developing Rubrics to Measure Impact

Evaluation 101

Evaluation 201

We recently conducted impact planning projects with the following museums.

Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

Mid-America Science Museum, Hot Springs, AR

National Museum of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History and Culture, Washington, DC

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY