November 10, 2017
BY: EMILY WELSH
Welcome to Reading Week, the part of the year where everyone catches up and gets ahead of the game. Last week the majority of our lecture slot was devoted to group time for us to work on our assignments. The remainder dealt with the question, "How do we know if our projects were successful?" Accountability is definitely an issue in not-for-profit organizations where revenue is not an easy avenue for determining the success of a project. Evaluation is however an important concept and not just so we can understand whether our projects have succeeded; having a plan in set for how you will assess a project may be a requirement for securing grants.
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| Assessing the success of museum projects isn't always as easy as number crunching! (Newmannnnnn). Source. |
Class Learning
The lecture introduced the concept of the balanced scorecard as one tool for evaluating performance. Basically the scorecard lays out an objective, measures for achieving the objective, and a target against which the project's process or end product can be assessed. To me, the concept seems arbitrary, deceivingly simple and thus not very useful. Perhaps its simplicity makes it worthwhile, however the discussion of the method left me with more confusion than clarity.
Reading Insight
Where to turn for more help:
Zorloni's article "Designing a Strategic Framework to Assess Museum Activities" in International Journal of Arts Management provides an excellent clarification on the balanced scorecard method and gives another reason for caring about evaluation: illustrating your success and leveraging that in fundraising. Her article contains a literature review on the method and a framework for building one in a museum setting. Her article explains the method quite well (including perspectives, critical success factors, and ideas for evaluating them). Zorloni gives a series of examples from an art museum context which are very helpful and could be applied to other settings.
Happy Planning!
Resources
Zorloni, A. (2012). Designing a strategic framework to assess museum activities. International Journal of Arts Management 14(2), 31–47.
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