Using One Evaluation to Affect Many

Abstract

Although visitor studies has gained in popularity in the museum field over the past decade, staff members in many institutions still believe that evaluation is a time-consuming, often complex practice that requires considerable resources and expertise.Over the past few years, evaluation professionals have begun developing innovative methods to streamline practice and increase efficiency with the goal of establishing more opportunities for strategic learning, timely and useful application of data, and building institutional evaluation capacity. As the interest and need for evaluation grows, the field must find ways to respond with agility and share effective strategies with a greater number of institutions engaged in visitor studies. This case study offers such an opportunity as it describes an example of how an institution's small evaluation team leveraged one initiative to affect not only other evaluation studies, but also its own evaluation practice.