Japanese American National Museum builds their “muscle for learning”

Since its founding in 1985, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) has worked to preserve and share the history of Japanese Americans. It continues to honor the past, while keeping it relevant today through its lens of social justice. Through its innovative storytelling and engaging programming, JANM seeks to “promote understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience.”

With such a lofty and energizing vision for impact, JANM wanted to know if it was making progress. JANM engaged Blue Garnet to:

• Break down their vision into bite-size, manageable, and measurable pieces, to understand if their programs and services were tracking towards success, or if they needed to course correct.
• Align efforts across departments so they were each working towards the same interim and final outcomes and understanding how their department’s work fit into the bigger picture.
• Build the practice of data use across JANM and an internal appetite for data-informed, strategic decision-making on an ongoing basis.

The JANM team sought to inform exhibit and program design by measuring what matters most. Together, we determined what factors contributed to visitors experiencing a change in understanding, empathy, and behavior, i.e., the impact JANM intends to make. To measure these key success factors and use data to inform decision-making, Blue Garnet:

• Guided cross-department teams to walk a mile in Museum visitors’ shoes and understand the “ideal client pathway” (e.g., understanding stories of discrimination, developing empathy, and changing behavior by applying to their own life and/or becoming more politically active).
• Facilitated a data audit of information JANM already collected, then mapped against the ideal client pathway to identify gaps and opportunities for future data collection.
• Developed and piloted new data gathering processes, building on JANM’s existing survey tools. We helped JANM draft and launch a range of exit surveys and interviews, asking new questions around desired impact.
• Translated theory into action by partnering with JANM to learn by doing. We coached JANM teams to conduct intercept surveys, engaging visitors directly to learn about changes in understanding, empathy, and action after a visit to JANM.
• Synthesized and analyzed findings from data collection pilot, to report on JANM’s impact.

By supporting JANM to collect and synthesize findings, we engaged teams in conversations about how to effectively use data across departments. Blue Garnet presented the findings visually to home in on the key takeaways that inform decision making. We guided them to describe and identify the “what?,” “so what?,” and “now what?” from the data.

After taking an in-depth look and identifying gaps in their understanding of the user experience, JANM knew they needed to do more. They had a lot of evidence of effort, (“how much are we doing?”), but little evidence of outcomes (“how well are we doing it?”) and impact (“what impact does it have?”) This galvanized them to focus more on outcomes and impact data.

The process of engaging all the JANM teams to collect this data helped build the muscle for learning across the organization. Team members got a personal taste of the museum’s impact while listening to visitors in surveys and interviews. A richer understanding of JANM’s clients helped them make decisions on future programming and lay out a plan for future data collection.

Furthermore, through insights drawn from data collected, JANM began to measure changes in client empathy and understanding— and the results show progress toward impact! For instance, the majority of JANM visitors reported increased ability to recognize connections between the Japanese American experience and their own life. This showed the positive impact on clients’ attitudes toward diverse communities, aligning with JANM’s mission and desired impact.

Since our work together, JANM has also brought on their first Chief Impact Officer, who will oversee the operations of the Museum through the lens of long-term impact on the communities it serves. We are proud of the JANM team for continuing to invest in its culture of learning for impact!

Blue Garnet is honored to partner with a client so eager to learn and grow. From the start, the JANM team pushed for an inclusive process to encourage cross-departmental conversation and collaboration. Mina Kumar, Project Leader at Blue Garnet, shares, “During each of our engagements with JANM, we sensed a strong hunger for strategic, data-informed decision making across the organization. Everyone at JANM was curious to understand how their work is contributing towards programmatic impact.”

Together, we learned that building a culture of learning means prioritizing progress over perfection. Piloting new practices and focusing on what we really wanted to learn, rather than trying to develop a perfect approach from the start, helped lower the barrier to using data. Mina reflects that sometimes organizations get bogged down thinking they do not have the knowledge or resources to collect data, and other times they get stuck on drafting the perfect survey tool. In this project, we borrowed questions from well-developed and vetted museum surveys, then quickly got to work getting answers in a collaborative process.

JANM has underscored one of our values at Blue Garnet: “learning for impact.” And building a culture of learning is a habit that develops over time! We are excited to see JANM continue to strengthen its muscles around learning to improve their museum experience and ultimately impact people’s attitudes and actions around diversity and inclusion in America.

For more information about JANM and to visit their museum in downtown Los Angeles, visit their website. And you can reach out to us at hello@bluegarnet.net with any questions about our work!