Listening Deeply
Practical methods for hearing how visitors think — listening sessions you can run yourself, and ways of reading what they surface. Everything that follows works better once this is in place.
Programs and events for the journey from outputs to outcomes.
One practice runs through all of it: understand the people you serve, name the value you create for them, build it into the work, and gather evidence that it reached people. Begin wherever your museum is.
Start the Outcomes AssessmentAbout 20 minutes, no account needed. Every museum that takes part receives its profile, benchmarked against the field.
Upcoming events
Live sessions, peer exchanges, and gatherings — open to join.
Understand who you serve and what they seek
Every museum carries a picture of its visitors. These courses are for testing that picture against the people in the building — what they arrive carrying, and what they hope to leave with.
Concepts & Summaries
Turn hours of recorded listening into material you can work with — concept by concept, in summaries that keep each person’s own reasoning intact.
Cultivating Patterns
Group what your listening surfaced into patterns of thinking, and keep them alive across seasons and exhibitions — a picture of your visitors that every new session sharpens.
Put your value into words that hold up
Most museums name themselves by what they put on — the exhibitions, the programs, the numbers through the door. This cohort is where executive leaders work out how to name the difference the museum makes in people’s lives, in language that holds up when a funder presses.
The Value Articulation Intensive
A small, facilitated cohort of executive leaders, co-convened with John Falk, working over several sessions to reframe what their institution is for — and to put that into language a board or a funder will recognize.
Build it into how the work runs
Turn the value you’ve named into the experiences you design — the programming, the interpretation, the daily calls about what goes on the wall. The Outcomes Assessment opens the door: it shows where your staff believe the museum already delivers, and where they don’t.
The Outcomes Assessment
Your staff rate how often they believe the museum produces each public outcome. Contribute your data, and your museum receives its own profile, benchmarked against the wider field — along with a way into the Lab.
The Outcomes Lab
Where staff turn their own data into changed practice, alongside leaders doing the same. Finishing the assessment is what opens the room, so everyone there reads from the same kind of evidence.
See what reached people
This is the stage most museums skip — checking whether the outcomes they designed for showed up in what visitors did and where they lingered. The evidence is there to read, past the attendance tally.
Visitor Heat Mapping
See where visitors move, linger, and drift away — and what those paths tell you about whether your galleries do what you meant them to.
What you find here is where the next round of listening begins.
When the decision belongs to the whole institution.
Some questions don’t sit inside a single program. They’re about where the museum should place its weight next, and they tend to reach a director’s desk. For those, we work directly with a few institutions each season — close, sustained, and shaped to your situation.
A handful of seats open each season; we keep the rooms small on purpose.
See how we work