Value is at the heart of museums

The contribution of arts and culture to well-being and good health has been in the news recently.

In an article in the Guardian[1], the Chair of Arts Council England, Sir Peter Bazalgette, argues that the arts have a powerful role to play in increasing health,  easing the pressures on the NHS[2] and potentially saving hundreds of millions of pounds in public health care costs. This theme is further elaborated in the Arts Council England’s January 2015 publication ‘Cultural Activities, artforms and wellbeing[3]’ co-authored by Daniel Fujiwarra and Michael McKerron.

Well-being is associated with life satisfaction, happiness and meaningfulness. But the New Economics Foundation (NEF 2009)[4] has developed a well-being hierarchy which provides greater definition. They distinguish between social and individual wellbeing. In this blog today, I want to focus on personal well-being, which NEF associates with positive feelings such as vitality, self esteem, competence, autonomy, engagement, meaning and purpose.

The good news is that users of museums and galleries (who constitute 52% of the English population)[5] describe their experience in ‘well-being’ terms. In a major critical review as part of the Cultural Value Project[6], Carol Scott of Carol Scott Associates[7] and Prof. Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd from the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, interrogated two decades of UK studies to discover how users described their experiences in museums.

We found that the users describe museums as a well-being experience, one that generates enjoyment, pleasure, stimulation and inspiration. It can be energising and uplifting as well as calming and healing.  In line with the NEF model, museum experiences can make people feel ‘alive’. An enhanced sense of self often results. People describe feelings of personal ‘dignity’, of pride, affirmation, confidence and confidence.  In their own words:

I have always liked art galleries because the atmosphere was calm compared with home.... It has shown me how to chill, I am much more relaxed and well happier! 

...it makes me feel alive when I look at art and things. Because I feel like I'm a working, functioning human being...

The first thing I saw, I felt, was- a refugee person can be something in this country -I felt proud of myself.

It’s changed my ideas about myself - I would actually feel capable now of going in and knowing I had something to offer a local group.

So investment in museums and galleries is paying dividends in terms of the quality of the experience and its positive outcomes for users. The next stage is to examine whether individuals’ positive museum experiences accrue to the public realm and result in positive health impacts.

 There are limited, but promising, indications that this is an evidential base worth exploring. In 2010, the Culture and Sport Evidence Programme (CASE) used Taking Part data to determine whether there were positive correlations between sport and cultural participation and subjective well-being. It found in the affirmative (2010, 36) suggesting that a similar analysis of museum and gallery participation could yield useful results towards proving that museums are contributing to the public health of the British population.

Last summer I was commissioned to work with the Sir Alexander Galt Museum and Archives (The Galt) in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada on a ‘public value plan’. The Galt is a publicly-owned and funded multi-disciplinary museum and archives focused on the rich history and culture of Lethbridge and Southern Alberta.  

A number of compelling factors present challenges and offer opportunities for The Galt to be of service to the local community in the coming decade. Lethbridge expects ‘boom’ economic growth through oil and gas activity and expanded industrial agriculture. The Galt also expects significantly-increased diversity in its community driven by industrial expansion and growth in urban First Nations, elderly and student populations. How to respond? What public value can The Galt contribute?

A key success factor in our project was The Galt’s ethos. It has an existing commitment to public value principles, a strong track record in community engagement, a passion for telling community stories through a diverse exhibition program and events, and an embedded habit of strategic thinking.  In many ways, The Galt was a dream client for this kind of work!

Carol’s book was our primary source of guidance for a public value-guided ‘mashup’ of my existing strategic planning framework. We were also guided by the Alberta Museums Association Sustainability Working Group’s five ‘Facets of Sustainability[1] and a number of other internationally-published works including AAM’s Trendswatch.

Museum staff began the process with a quick, but robust stakeholder engagement process which focused on each stakeholder’s insights into the direction, needs and issues of the Lethbridge and Southern Alberta community in relation to their own organizations. We distilled this information to find recurring themes across all stakeholders.  Stakeholder feedback, combined with the Galt Planning Team’s own visioning of community trends and issues profoundly informed the plan’s development and content. 

My strategic planning work has long made use of Appreciative Inquiry[2] and ‘SOAR’[3] methods to encourage generative thinking. We found that SOAR worked beautifully with public value concepts. As a Recognized Museum in Alberta, The Galt was already accustomed to rigorous review of its core museum operations and we were able to re-purpose our internal analysis of standard museum functions to focus on the public value capabilities which would be needed to support this fundamental strategic direction. 

The Planning Team reviewed and re-interpreted their existing mission and vision statements through a public value lens and focused on value propositions and community and visitor outcomes.

In the end, we met the project’s scope and timing requirements and developed a strategic plan worthy of this remarkable institution; the plan was approved by the Galt’s Board with few amendments.  It was thrilling to work with such a public value-savvy team and to see how public value thinking could energize and bring vastly greater meaning to the strategic planning process.   As a consultant, my strategic planning process now is driven even more deeply by public value concepts. 

Providing evidence that museums create social value is essential for making the case to governments for continued public investment. Now, recent research for the Heritage Lottery Fund finds that social investors are also calling for the cultural heritage sector to ‘get to grips with measuring social impact’ according to Dan Corry, who presented at the recent Heritage Exchange Forum (14-15 July 2014, London).

With public investment in decline, engaging non-public, social investors is becoming imperative. But whether the funding comes from the public or non-public spheres, investors want to know what difference their contribution has made and whether it has achieved what it set out to do. Enter- the concept of ‘impact’ and how to measure it- subjects of long and vigorous discussions in the cultural heritage sector. 

As Korn argues in Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures (Scott 2013, 31-43), institutions can more easily measure impact when they plan for the difference they want to make, identify the results they are seeking to achieve and link measures to defined interventions. Individually, museums are starting to think about planning for social change with this intentional aspect in mind.

But what about other social impacts that are not the results of specific institutional planning? Do museums in general create value that accrues to the public realm? If so, where is the evidence and how do we capture it?

Getting to grips with social impact can start with existing data sets and the methods they use to capture evidence. The Taking Part survey, for example, has been collecting data on cultural and sport participation in England since 2005. Managed by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in partnership with English Heritage, Arts Council England and Sport England, it surveys nationally representative samples of adults and children at regular intervals each year. The data is longitudinal, allowing changes to be tracked over time and comparisons to be made between users and non-users.

For nearly a decade, it has collected baseline data on cultural participation using Subjective Wellbeing (SWB) methods that allow individuals to assign a numeric value to cultural experiences and to self- perceptions of well-being, trust, belonging and influence. Correlations can then be made between cultural participation and its impact on both individual well-being and the presence of other indicators of social capital needed to build healthy communities.

In 2010, Jones (2010, 13) used Taking Part data to test the assumption that the ‘... more individuals participate, the greater the benefit of overall participation to society’. Of particular interest was whether cultural participation has an impact on social capital in communities, specifically on the presence of ‘trust’. The study found that people who engage in cultural activities are 15% more likely to ‘trust’ others than those who do not (Jones 2010, 52). Evidence that participating in cultural activities can have positive impacts which accrue to the public realm is the sort of evidence that public funders and social investors are looking for when we make the case for the importance of cultural heritage.  

Taking Part and the Culture and Sport Evidence programme (CASE) are existing resources that merit our close attention. Our sector can ‘get to grips’ with social impact by mining this data more extensively to find out what other evidence it yields.

 Taking Part: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/taking-part

CASE programme: https://www.gov.uk/case-programme

Mark Moore was one of the earliest proponents of engaging the public as co-producers in creating public value. But he also clearly identified the public as the ‘ultimate authorisers’ of value. Kelly et al (2002) furthered his arguments for public engagement making a case from the perspectives of both principle and pragmatism. One the one hand, they argue that public preferences are at the heart of Public Value in a democracy where only the public can determine what is truly of value to them. Pragmatically, they point out that engaging the public makes sense for governments and institutions because it gives access to intelligence necessary to gain a better understanding of established preferences and to predict emerging attitudes and expectations.

From the perspective of public sector managers, if the priorities and expectations of the public shift, and the culture of a public body does not, then satisfaction and trust in the service may be undermined, a point attested to by research indicating  that service users are well attuned to the ethos of providers (Kelly et al, 2002, 24). Blaug, Horner & Lehki (2006, 7) are unequivocal:

If organisations are to create public value in their practices and use evaluative standards to measure their performance, then those values and evaluative standards must be authorised by the public.

What happens, then, when the values of an organisation and those of the public are at variance? When Moore talks about addressing ‘unmet social needs’ in the public realm as a focus for public value creation, it resonates strongly with the museum sector’s focus on the social impact agenda of museums. So what do we do when the public indicates that the social impact agenda is not what they value most about museums?

References

Blaug R. Horner L. and Lekhi R. (2006). Public value, politics and public management: A literature review. London: The Work Foundation.

Britain Thinks. (2013). Public Perceptions- and attitudes to- the purposes of museums in society. London: Museums Association.

Kelly G. Mulgan G. And Muers, S. (2002). Creating public value: an analytical framework for public service reform. London:  Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office.

Scott C. A. (2010). Searching for the public in Public Value: arts and cultural heritage in Australia. Cultural Trends, 19, 4, 273- 289.

Scott C.A. (2013). Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures. London: Ashgate.

This week, Ben Garcia, author of the chapter ‘Creating Public Value through Museum Education’ In Museums and Public Value: creating sustainable futures, considers whether public value can be ‘fun’.

When I first read Mary Ellen Munley’s question in this blog about public value goals central to the work of the museum and Marsha Semmel’s proposition that museums of value work to become more essential to their communities, I did not think first of beer tastings. But I recently had the opportunity to visit a museum programme in a city that prides itself on its beer culture, and where a large sector of the community engages around music and beer and burgers. So, is this museum –capitalising on existing community interests and providing an enjoyable experience for visitors in the process- doing something of public value?

Part of the challenge when thinking about public value, is that most of the literature comes from an advocacy or research perspective—and these are not realms known for fun. The messages are often reflective and usually directed to a worthy social goal. I have been thinking lately about fun. And about how that term applies to public value.

The beer-tasting event at The Museum of Man in San Diego which I attended last week is indicative of that museum’s wider strategy towards populist exhibitions that incorporate unexpected connections to current social issues. The tasting was one of several held in conjunction with a beer exhibition that features vessels and tools used for the production and consumption of beer throughout history and around the world. The objects were accompanied by informative and humorous labels about cross-cultural beer-making traditions and the exhibit included a wonderful interactive component related to beer terminology around the world.

Walking about the great hall, surrounded by a buzz of museum patrons sampling local beers and eating a variety of foods from area restaurants, I was thinking about the value of programs like these. Museums are often conflicted when the events that garner the greatest public response are those that lie farthest away from traditional notions of museums’ social value.

And then I noticed that the museum had located an exhibition about cooperative businesses run by women in developing countries directly across from the beer exhibition. That space featured objects made by artisans and artists in cooperatives in South Africa, South America, India and elsewhere. The interpretation was an exploration of the socioeconomic factors that underpinned the scarce resources in these communities and a description of the efforts women had made on their own behalf to raise the community out of poverty. As I watched visitors move from the beer exhibition to the beer-tasting event to the exhibition about artist cooperatives I saw the Museum of Man model in action. And I saw fun and public value aligned.

We tend to be very serious when we talk about the role of museums in society.  I wonder if those of us who advocate for the public value of museums might do well to follow the example of museums like The Museum of Man and keep the “fun” in profundity.