Museology Communications and Marketing Assistant Xavier Lucas-Cooper (’27) spoke with Thomas McNulty (’26) about his experiences in the Museology Evaluation Specialization.
What kinds of questions or challenges shaped how you designed your evaluation approach?
We were recruited by MOPOP to do an evaluation project on visitor perceptions of relevance in MOPOP’s exhibition content, as well as understand the characteristics/demographics of MOPOP’s visitorship, primarily their winter audience. The idea of “relevance” was an exciting challenge in and of itself. When designing our project and instruments, we struggled and toyed with how to define something that we all intuitively understand but academically have a difficult time defining. We constantly asked ourselves: “What does relevance mean in the context of pop culture? What are the dimensions or defining characteristics? What are the different kinds of relevance? Personal, social, topical…?” This is where research and a literature review came in handy for us and really informed how we defined “relevance” in the context of our study, and ultimately how we designed our surveys and instruments. It’s wild how one innocuous word can so heavily impact a project, but our constant agonizing over it made our project stronger in the end. This is on top of the fact that we essentially did 2 evaluations in one: a demographic study plus an exploration of perceptions of relevance.
What skills did you find yourself developing most through this project that you didn’t anticipate at the start?
Coordinating with and understanding the needs of a host institution was a valuable skill I learned, mapping the wants/needs of an institution vs the capacities and abilities of us student evaluators. Navigating decision making can be tricky, and so can learning when to say “no.” Yes, it’s exciting to do a big impactful project that investigates a plethora of issues and phenomena. But, given the capacity of a student team, it was important that we balanced scope/quantity with quality/depth. By investigating only one core concept (relevance) on top of demographics, we were able to provide more quality/in-depth conclusions and recommendations than we otherwise would have. All-in-all, this has been a fabulous hands-on project that has made me much more confident and competent in evaluative practices.
How has working in evaluation influenced your understanding of what “success” looks like in museum work?
I think evaluation is a crucial metric of “success” in museum practice—it’s how we can begin to understand and contextualize how well we are serving our audiences and potential impacts of our work. Especially since it’s backed by ethical and thorough data collection and analysis. Museums can design programs, exhibits, projects, and the like in myriad ways; sometimes fully internally, sometimes with community input/co-creation, etc. But evaluation is such a useful tool for interrogating practice and responding to the communities that museums aim to serve. That is to say: data-driven audience connection/understanding strategies are not meant to be a replacement for the more humanistic methods that museums often already do so well; rather, when done ethically, they can be compatible and influence one another. Also, in a landscape of variable funding/resources, evaluations help museums apply for/receive grants!!
Looking back, how did your expectations of evaluation practice compare with what you actually experienced during your project?
My idea of what the evaluation process was and how it functioned matched pretty well to how the project played out, thanks to introductory classes my first year. A key revelation, though, was that creating a sort of map/mental understanding of your project’s workload beforehand is so crucial. For example, if you aim to get 200 survey respondents, and you ask 5-6 qualitative/free response questions on your questionnaire, that may not seem like a lot of data at first… but that would be 1,000-1,200 responses total that would need coding, and different code books to match each question/theme (on top of quantitative data analysis). Not that it can’t be done, but you’re sure going to have a pretty good plan for how you’re going to tackle all that data in Spring quarter. This really impacted how much we took on during the project and what we focused on. This is also a lesson in crafting a purpose statement and evaluation questions—really interrogating and refining them, and asking yourself: “How many themes/issues are we raising? Can we answer all of these questions in a year? If not, what is most important? If yes, how?”