Engaging your Community: A Toolkit for Museums

Assemble a Working Group
Form a Working Group that represents several kinds of people involved in the museum, including staff, board members, and volunteers. The goal of the Working Group is to help steer the museum through the Engaging your Community process.

Find a Facilitator
Find a Facilitator or choose a Team Leader. A skilled facilitator ensures that your ideas and action items are documented and helps your group stay focused on the discussion and results, rather than getting bogged down by the process.

Working Group Orientation
Orient your Working Group to the purpose in undertaking the Engaging your Community process, discuss the goals of the group and get aligned, and schedule the sessions and meetings for the duration of the project.

Group Self-Assessment
The self-assessment phase is a time for examining, reflecting, delving into and understanding what you are currently doing and how that helps or hinders developing a closer relationship with your community. It is a time to take stock, celebrate successes, and re-energize to build capacity for future opportunities.

Community Consultation
The community consultation is a time for aligning the museum’s mission, programs and services with the community’s objectives to achieve mutual goals. Museums should serve and be responsive to their community, and by strengthening the relationship between the museum and the community, the museum is more likely to be relevant, ensure ongoing support, and be sustainable in the long term.

• Option A: Community Conversations
• Option A: Community Conversations (Short Version)
• Option B: Serious Play
• Option C: Visioning Change

Plan for the Future
It’s now time to take all of the outputs and learnings garnered throughout the Engaging your Community: process and turn it into an action plan.

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