 Hi everyone and welcome to Knight Foundation Discovery. I'm Chris Barr, Director of Arts and Technology Innovation at Knight Foundation. On Discovery we talk about things that impact the arts and culture in our communities and today we'll be discussing a recent report that Knight Foundation released on digital readiness and innovation in museums. With my guests Kate Hawatt-Haley-Goldman, Principal at HG & Co. Lead researcher on the report and she's going to help lead us through some of those findings and Loic Talon, an expert associate partner at McKinsey & Company where he focuses on digital strategy and transformation and previously as Chief Digital Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Welcome to you both. Hello Chris. So I just want to get started a little bit and talk about from the Knight Foundation perspective our interest in releasing a survey like the one that we'll be talking about and the work that we're doing with museums around the countries and specifically in the eight communities where we focus. I also wanted to do a little bit of housekeeping. This is being recorded and folks will be able to access the conversation afterwards and you can ask questions throughout the conversation in the chat on whatever platform that you're watching this on so feel free to ask questions as they come up and we'll do our very, very best. It's hard in a short amount of time to get through everything but we'll do our best to answer some of those but we're always available on email, social media, etc. to answer anything that we don't get to so we'll try to be accessible as we can. Before we dive into some of the findings on the research so let me just say a few things about the work that we've been doing. So Knight Foundation as you know is an arts funder in eight communities around the country. We focus on a number of aspects of arts within those communities and one of those is digital transformation and how we can help organizations reach audiences in the digital age. We've done this through funding innovation and experiments within the field funding field based learning through organizations like MCN and others and by funding staffing and capacity building within institutions in our cities and as we've done this work we've wanted to better understand where the field is at large to build that capacity in order to understand not only how well the organizations in the cities that we love and care about are doing but also where as a field we need to improve in order to reach the opportunity that we might have with digital and this was really what was behind some of the survey that that Kate helped us with and part of what was behind the the matrix and research that came before it. We've been working for a number of years with organizations taking them through human center design training helping them experiment in new ways and think through the processes really required to to succeed with digital and with this survey we knew we needed some kind of benchmark to to understand where folks were at around the country and to hopefully guide us a little bit about where people might go from here and so Kate this is this is where I'd love to bring you in and talk a little bit about the report and some of the things that we found I should note also you can find this report online at kf.org if you go to our research section and it should be right there and it's it's packed full of data and information that hopefully we think is useful to the field. Sure thanks Chris and I'll just talk a little before I start the slides that go over the the key findings with this to give you a little bit of a sense so this is a report where we worked with AAM to contact individuals at all of their member institutions to be able to look at but really focus at art history and science institutions with some bit of zoos and aquarius we get responses from all 50 states and this data set and a few international but this data set really focuses on the U.S. folks at that point in time and it's kind of a funny data set right because there is that response bias yet still it gives us some really interesting beginning insights I would say into where digital literacy is within the museum sector where that sense of innovation is within our field. So this framework that Chris is talking about draws from other sectors including business sectors journalism etc that have different ideas about digital innovation and one of the things that intrigued me most about working with night is that roots in journalism and seeing an industry devastated by how our society has evolved and we're at this inflection point in museum work and thinking about how digital intersects with that inflection point and then with the pandemic gives us some thoughts about where perhaps we want to emerge when we come out of this pandemic. I will say that all the data was gathered pre-pandemic so you know we have to have that little bit of a lens on it when we go through it. Now if we could go into since it's just so short the first really key finding is that size has a huge impact on when it comes to digital readiness as you might imagine. Most of the institutions in the United States are smaller institutions we defined small as those institutions with a budget of five million annually or less and very few staff members and that brings us to this slide where you can see how the impact of low budget and low numbers of staff understandably is low numbers of staff that are directly dedicated to digital so and it's a little bit small but on the far left hand side of the screen is that we are those numbers on we have only one individual or no individuals dedicated to digital within our institution. We can expect that number 62 62% of small and medium sizes 62% of small institutions have no digital 18% of medium institutions have only one or less individuals dedicated to digital and that that particular finding has implications across all of our other findings. If we go to the next slide one of the other pieces is about digital strategy now as we all know digital strategy has been hotly debated within the field whether it's important to have a digital strategy have a strategic plan that incorporates digital and we asked all of those different elements here but as you can see a third of the institutions that we talked to had no digital strategy at that point in time and 29% didn't have a digital strategy formalized yet they're discussing it they're in the process so that brings us to to over half of the institutions who don't have a digital strategy in play. Going forward from that we want to talk a little bit about outcomes and how digital projects go through here so this and I should have added a little bit of title these are the institutions that don't track outcomes or KPIs in any way so that's 40% of art institutions 46% of history institutions that's a really large number considering that thinking about outcomes is not necessarily a size dependent issue right you this is you do not need to have robust software and hardware in order to be very intentional about who you're going to be reaching and how you'd like to carry that out. If we go into the next slide we can talk about how though here we go we can see the actual numbers on the far left so of the small institutions 45% but even at the large institutions 14% are not measuring outcomes or defining goals or KPIs within this piece and that seems rather shocking given our environment but being in the museum culture we can all see how this happens right that there's this slow erosion of goals and outcomes out of time so this sort of piece in terms of knowing whether we're having an impact with what we're designing is really not there in the same way that it should be. If we go to the next slide the interesting thing about this data set is that it's primarily leaders who answered I would say you know and I'd have to I'm not going to go away from the camera at the moment it's it's a high number of leadership individuals that answered and not surprisingly they rated themselves as very high in support for digital projects very few people said that they were not if we can just go back one if the very few people said that they were not ready for digital to be in their galleries it was not that they were hostile to digital but they might be unknowing about digital nonetheless they had a very high rate of interest within that. We're into the next one we can talk about audience research and so we asked about a range of audience research types from just from gathering anecdotal data to getting basic feedback like zip codes on to community-based evaluation, iterative formative evaluation and then strategic and impact evaluation so what you can see here is that there is a range of different pieces that people are doing about half of the institutions are collecting some sort of basic feedback within this but if we go to the line below that much lower numbers of institutions are involving their community in any strong way. Finally there's very few institutions that actually look at the impact of their work as evaluators know science museums are almost always leaving the charge there in that they're looking at the change in interests and behaviors and etc that their work pushes forward but still it's a it's a fairly slow small number in terms of of impact and if we then talk about project management so project management is is a really intriguing piece and in my experience something we don't talk about often enough within museum organizations and then you can see here we've broken in out the gray bar represents that there are little to no formalized project management practices or roles so that varies across institutions but institutions in total about a third have no project management but those are some of the top findings that we have through here and I'm aware that our time is limited so I'm going to stop at that point and and open it up to I believe Loak is going to give us some commentary on where we're at these pieces. Wonderful thank you so much Kate and and we do want to get Loak in the conversation here and there's so much there's so much to unpack and and I think one place I would be interested in starting is around the goal tracking around the impact and even identifying our success metrics and and if we could start there with some thoughts about the challenges there and and and despite this sort of how daunting that might seem how should people think about approaching that particular challenge? Great happy to talk to that and I'll start by saying thank you for inviting me to be part of this and I mean honestly I since I can say it thank you to the Knight Foundation and to Kate and your team for doing this research it's it's one of those research pieces that you read being like oh you instinctively feel some of these pressures but to actually see data proving it out is is is really fantastic so to go into that point about KPIs I think Kate said it really well which made a point that having a having a target having a goal is not something that money makes easier or size of institution makes easier that's a mindset question ultimately I think it ties to the to the project management one which Kate ended with and I should have touched on two but that goal setting piece how I think one of the challenges that we have it with digital and cultural organizations or generally is knowing exactly what to measure and we almost get crippled by there being too much data or too many things to measure or people being undecided about what is the most important piece to measure and it ends up in dashboards that have 50 KPIs when no one's actually paying attention to anything I think the most the key thing is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good like pick two or three data points you think are our reasonable starting point data points and just and stick with them and commit as a team that this is what we're going to go after and get that cohesion right at the start of the project rather than part of the way through and where someone might say all of our success criteria those page views as opposed as opposed to sessions perhaps whatever your kpi your kpi is so I think the real thing is like getting that commitment right at the start I think it's telling the fact that you know I think a 78% of respondents this survey said that they don't have KPIs where it's on an ad hoc basis just suggests we don't know where our goalposts are when we're building something so we actually don't know when we're being successful I think that's something that's really important we take on board and turn that around in our mindset I guess if I can then just build on the last point Kate the project management one because you know it's something that I believe in as well there's like this this process because ultimately at the core of this is people is a staff working in these areas is talent and how they work together a machete language that they have to deliver projects becomes very important and you know I think of ways of working around agile or teaching people scrum and getting that common language to deliver projects starts putting KPIs at the front as well I think if you're if people could start agreeing that project management language as an organization I think that'd be very helpful and that's something you see come out of this there's so little of it I think that'd be another way of really stepping up where it's not actually a significant financial challenge or a size constraint it's just an agreement among a group of people to work the same way and I should note again right that this this survey was done pre-pandemic and so this is a snapshot of where the the fields stood in 2019 um and we're experiencing a much different environment obviously right now and out of that is coming I believe a lot of creativity and a lot of folks working in different ways and I wonder if either of you could speak to things that you're seeing that look like folks starting to move in the direction of changing processes changing the way they manage work communicate internally etc just anecdotally thinking about how organizations are are addressing this particular moment sure I think early in the pandemic we saw this great explosion of creativity or creativity mixed with fear right in trying to figure out what we could do to continue to reach our audiences and there were wild and wonderful programs that were occurring because we didn't know how to do that yet and it was this sort of design thinking brainstorming moment where in some ways where museums let their guard down a little bit about trying new things in that attempt where we fell down there is I don't think we've had reflective conversations about what we feel like worked right so we went through the experimentation phase and then didn't have the reflection phase in that same piece I will also say that the digital folks that I work with tell me that digital is more valuable than ever obviously right and more tasked within their institutions than ever so I do see coming out of this a stronger reliance on digital a knowledge that that is an essential not a nice to have when you're incorporating those pieces in seeing the divides between pre-pandemic between institutions who were more developed in their digital innovation what moves small institutions up was some amount of staff and some amount of skills moving from from medium to large the difference was that lack of strategy right and so you could really see that what can lift up a a small institution who's doing exceptionally good work in digital might be that small amount of staff and that small amount of strategy and measurement that would would allow them to get to the next level so that's sort of projecting into the future but I'll lock you I'll hand it to you I think I don't need to build on what you said I think those early phases I think we at McKinsey we gave a seminar in June to museum leaders about reopening which almost now seems like the world has changed so much since June I mean we almost laugh at the reopening was the main topic and so much has changed in that time and you know I think it forced museums cultural relations to be more agile it literally obligated that agility and I think there was a reactive phase but now I look at organizations thinking like what will be the business model behind this in the business model of institutions is being significantly disrupted right now and whilst there's that moment where if it lasted for a short moment in time there could have been a digital burst per se to cover a gap but now the question is like longer term what does this look like as a business model if people are really leaning into digital as a main platform and that's conversation I hear more and more I think it's a I think it's an important one to be having it's almost one which is should have happened probably earlier without needing a pandemic to provoke it you know I think institutions had their moment where they're digitizing their collection and they're getting their content online and then they became a little bit more I hope audience focused and was like digitizing their audience and now we need to kind of get into digitizing their business model I think those that's a conversation I see people going along right now and there's a lot of focus on that business model component the other interesting thing and seeing some of it doesn't directly address one of the questions in the q&a but it's a fascinating point at this point because the audience research baselines have been wiped away right so the people that are coming to our institutions that mix of local regional international is not the same as it was before for some institutions that's an exploding growth in local visitorship and for other institutions it's a very different story but not only has the mix of visitors changed but the motivations for why we are going has changed in the context around that so people who are seeking different types of experiences and they're engaging with different you know mixes of people or less mix of people when they do this so the the research that I would have done a year ago is not necessarily valid in an institution as they get to know perhaps even the same visitors who have now different characteristics and I think coming out of the pandemic then it becomes very important to be in touch with what who is visiting your institution right now and what their needs are and how those needs are evolving I think that's a really wonderful point Kate and it makes me think about starting points right and so where where and how do you start to do this work if you if you haven't been doing much with digital within your institution there can be a knee jerk reaction that you know one that's great for the Met and and the like but it's not really what we do you meanwhile where do we start and I think you point to one starting point which is start with the audience right understand the needs of the folks that you serve work on that first before you ever start designing solutions that that meet those needs and and I would I would also sort of say that's a perspective that Knight Foundation holds as well that understanding the folks that we're we're producing work for is vitally important to there might be some easy spots and look in our in our conversation earlier this week you you talked about the kind of decisions even basic decisions about websites about social media etc that that folks are thinking about right now and can you talk a little bit about starting points there and shift some mindset that that organizations might make as they're approaching those decisions sure I think the way I see this and the data shows this idea that 50 percent of institutions have one or less organization one or less person working in digital in the organization and that's you know when you could if I'm right on that but I I assume that that may even be high ultimately because more digitally minded organizations may be answered to the survey even if it is 50 percent the idea that each of those institutions with their one or less person is going to crack this on their own I find difficult to believe I just I don't see how it's humanly possible no matter how talented the people in those institutions are so I actually think right now we need to look at how those institution like rethink actually how those institutions work together how they collaborate to build solutions honestly how funders fund impact in that area to obligate that kind of collaboration so it's a team of people maybe working across multiple institutions because I'm also very conscious of those organizations where there is only one person working on a digital working in digital when that person leaves you then see a drop away again there's no continued transformation I think if we start rethinking how they how how we're actually working in digital in these smaller organizations and then start thinking about then have that good conversation about our KP about what our KPIs are what our goal is in using digital I think we'll find there are tools which are which are accessible and even it can be as simple as making sure your institutions um google maps profile is entirely up to date that your google profile update that your social media presence is up to date and even those kind of areas maybe should arrive before you even think about building your own website because those may reach your KPIs in terms of reaching new audiences or getting getting people engaged with your content I think people very quickly go towards the platform again if we think about how we work and we think about our goals I think we'll have more success I think we we do have a problem in our field on pipeline right so the small institutions can't get the digital project managers that they keep with those skills and that pipeline extends all the way up into larger institutions or more well-funded institutes who then end up getting folks outside of the field because that's where the larger population of these skills are or they don't trust the the the skills that have been grown through the museum field I think there is a pipeline problem in digital with museums and that that extends all the way through our field I want to talk a little bit more about and this isn't really covered in the report but Loick sort of moved us towards this conversation and the idea that we need to work together more as a field here we're talking about how well individual organizations have staffed and organized digital individually we do have an aspect of partnerships here and certainly there are partnerships with industry with technology with outside vendors all of those things are part of the equation how do you all think the field should be collaborating with each other if we think about large-scale projects like tessitura on the ticketing side etc there have been successful attempts to to think about technology that benefits a field how should the museum field be thinking about this particular moment especially as we know we're under-resourced right and if we're under-resourced as a field how do we pull those resources better to get where we need to be with technology I will give a someone who I'll say left the field but left the cultural organization a little bit ago but the one commentary I really feel in this area is I think the cultural sector was probably the most collaborative or is the most collaborative sector the amount of sharing between institutions on knowledge is is incredible the generosity there where I think the next step is actually it's it's building things together I think the tessitura example is a really good one where a group of institutions came together to solve the software issue that we were facing you know I look at european it's a slightly different model but again a group of organizations coming together and and effectively it's the governments at that stage deciding to combine resources to achieve something and to get to get collections online and I could look at what the cooper he was announced recently around around creating a lab the number of organizations to really rethink what the visitor experience is I think those formalizing those kind of collaborations and trying to build something out of it I think is the next step rather than the and going beyond the very generous sharing and collaboration we already have the cyber sector and and I just want to give a plug as well I'm thinking about knowledge sharing there are lots of fantastic places where we see museum technologists and museum professionals etc coming together to share knowledge we want to thank of course aam for their support of this survey I would also point to the mcm conference which is happening in two weeks this is a really important space for folks who are working within technology fields and so that's virtual and if you're getting anything out of this conversation then I would say that's a place for you as well and to make sure that you attend that I do want to get to a few questions that are that are coming in and and I would say a lot of those folks are folks are thinking about the future as as you can expect and and so as we think about transformation and digital transformation and what the future looks like and and none of us are fortune tellers and predict the future but what thoughts do you have about the kinds of things museums might transition to in their digital thinking going forward I think there's there's a lot unresolved in terms of digital interactives and how we're going to work with those in physical spaces people feel safest with their phones so some of the AR based experiences kiosk based experiences all of that that I'm working on now where there's a movement to controlling it on your own phone now that is difficult to play in in many ways not ideal but in in some ways it also gives an amount of control to the user we're seeing some amount of digital experimentation especially with my colleagues in the theater sector and those experiences are very interesting in terms of how can you make zoom feel like a different experience within that and then I would say the libraries that we've been working with we just wrapped up a large project with the urban libraries council and looking at that libraries have to be very responsive to what their communities and patrons need and they are seeking that sort of input right now where are the communities broken and where what is library's role to do that and while I see some effort from some of the museums within this it is still how are we going to emerge we meaning the museum rather than we meaning the community from this and so that mindset shift hasn't quite happened there and while my work every single institution I've worked with in the last few years has asked me about relevance until we make that mind shift moment the relevance question becomes very very difficult I would say so there is exciting opportunities within this but I would say that we have a long way to go in the process of our thinking and I have another question here and and this this one is one that's really interesting to me because it gets to something that I think is embedded within digital culture and that is collaboration participation and co-creation and question from the audience do you find new ways that museums are reaching out to communities for digital content do those include things like outsourced exhibitions etc so so what are the opportunities right you know I think museums as sort of places where lots of expertise is held and where knowledge is shared with the public what opportunities do do the digital space help those institutions reverse that flow where knowledge is flowing into the institution from the community as well do you see do you see opportunities there for co-creation for I see opportunities for feedback I would say co-creation I have a fairly high bar for in co-creation you are not only proposing solutions but you're defining the problem right and we tend to hold that problem in a in a culturally dominant fashion of this is we've decided what the problem is and now we want to invite some of the community and to help us think about the solutions rather than sitting with our communities and figuring out how that community views the problems at stake and then and then doing solutions I would say the opportunity for feedback though has been wide and diverse right and so the amount the the chat based components the public programs that are online I think that that has brought museums and their their visitors closer together in some ways in dialogue that is happening in chat at times or discussions at times that we don't see happening quite the same way in person great well we are a little bit over our time but I do want to do a quick final round this is this is a lot to absorb but I I do think it's important that we we know where we're at and we start to think about where we're going and as as folks make the really difficult decisions that they have to make within their institutions not just about digital but also about the ways that they're addressing their community needs the ways that they're thinking about social justice the ways that they're thinking about shifting their programming in all sorts of ways not and on top of that just trying to get open again what's one easy thing that folks can think about that that might make digital feel a little easier to approach I will um what are my favorite phrases in digital and something my I form a team would go crazy me just repeating it's just do the fundamentals brilliantly I mean do the fundamentals brilliantly it's digital I mean I also isn't this big flashy gizmo-esque augmented holographic thing um it's it's not it's it's just a way of exchanging information and connecting with people and doing the fundamental components of digital well of building your digital presence I'll go back to like someone's google profile making sure that their seo is good page load time good visitor information doing that fundamental work well I think it's the number one piece I would really I'd push towards and I you know I as we come out of as we hope we come out of the pandemic you know I think of the other the the huge conversations in the US and globally that being brought up by the black lives map black lives matters movements um how museums are relevant and how and how inclusive we can be becomes a big part of how we work um I like to think that digital provides us the tools to really participate in those conversations I think that's something I really hope becomes part of a mindset of cultural organizations wonderful Kate a closing thought um on a practical level I do think it is getting to know your visitors and and developing some some basic skills possibly project management skills for the small organizations and for the large organizations really putting through that intentionality in in their strategy um that we should be seeing a movement towards that within within strategy from a from a more abstract um point I think that the this is the moment that we can think about using our cultural capital for good and that if we build up all this trust and respect then we need to be able to spend it on the things that we believe in and that we need to be willing to to give up that sense of authority in order to be able to move into the next age and that means inviting outsiders outsiders to come to the table and and talk to this and when I say outsiders I mean things like everyone from politicians to school teachers to to children to to the table to to be able to have a more robust conversation without that change in who holds authority then I think it's a very difficult future but we have such an opportunity at this moment wonderful and that's a wonderful place to end it Kate Lohit thank you both so much for joining us today I do want to remind folks if you want to dig into the report it's online at kf.org you can find past episodes of this program online at kf.org slash discovery I want to thank the folks helping bring this stream to you Raul Justin and Grace thank you so much and our exit music um is from the great there and brown thank you all for watching and thanks have a great week for the conversation to continue it's important absolutely find us online and I'll just drop in there bar at kf.org if you want to reach me or hey chris bar is the twitter handle love to talk more about this stuff thanks so much everyone thank you