Traveling Exhibition Group Sessions
Planning with Logic Models
Instructors: Nicole MartinRogers and Sheila Brommel
In this Tuesday hands-on session, participants will learn why logic models are important for effective evaluation and overall project planning and communication. We identify the key components including inputs, activities, outputs and short term, intermediate, and long term outcomes. We will first practice the logic model process with a hypothetical exhibit project. Then, the group will develop the logic model for the Great Lakes Culture Keepers collaborative traveling exhibition project by starting to identify the target audience(s) of the project and the changes in knowledge, attitudes and behavior that you hope the traveling exhibition will bring about. Participants will be provided with a folder of resources including example logic models, templates, and resource list.
Participants will:
- Learn why logic models are a foundational tool for effective evaluation and project planning and communication
- Understand each component of a logic model, including inputs, activities, outputs, short term outcomes, intermediate outcomes, and long term outcomes
- Create a draft logic model for the traveling exhibition
Traveling Exhibition Group Session: Audience and Outcomes
Instructors: Nicole MartinRogers and Sheila Brommel
This session is a continuation of Tuesday’s session on using logic models to support successful evaluation. The instructors will produce a draft of the traveling exhibition logic model developed on Tuesday for participant review and feedback. Finalizing the logic model lays the foundation for the overall evaluation plan. Learning Objectives Participants will:
- Review and finalize the draft logic model
- Understand the purpose and basic principles of evaluation plans
- Other ideas for next steps in evaluating the traveling exhibit
Workshop and Class Offerings
Best Practices of Cultural Organization Marketing
Effective Research Techniques
Exhibits with Schools and Tribal Departments
Project Management Lite: Tools that can help you be more organized and efficient and work better with others
Bringing Community Voices Into Exhibitions
Digital Storytelling with Video
Describing Your Resources: Reasons and Tools
Fundraising and Budgeting Basics
Grant Writing: Elements and Strategies
Intellectual Property and the Native Cultural Center
Program Planning and Evaluation Office Hours
Mukurtu CMS Site Building, Community Engagement and Virtual Exhibiting
Telling Your Story with Your Website
Workshops
Workshops are 2 hours long and will be on Monday afternoon.
Best Practices of Cultural Organization Marketing
Instructors: Esther Helms & Shannon Martin
In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn about the creative and exciting world of low-budget to no-budget marketing strategies. We will explore basic and innovative marketing principals as they apply to cultural centers, libraries and museums. The workshop will cover principals such as audience analysis, potential marketing partnerships, and communications plans. Attendees will develop a strategy for their own marketing plan as it applies to their institution. Come prepared with your mission statement and event calendar, if you have one.
Participants will:
- Learn what “guerrilla marketing” is, why it is essential, and how it will cost-effectively promote your institution and/or event
- See examples and templates of marketing & promotional tools
- Understand how to develop and use a marketing plan to comprehensively promote events
- Gain confidence in the e-marketing, digital and social media worlds
Instructors: Patricia Marroquin Norby and Seonaid Valiant
The Newberry Library holds over 500,000 pieces of art, photographs and maps relevant to the histories of indigenous communities throughout the Americas and the Pacific Islands, many of which are created from non-Indigenous perspectives. Workshop participants will discuss research methods that can help benefit your institution, community, and the Great Lakes Convening Culture Keepers traveling exhibition as you investigate and interpret visual and textual materials held in private libraries. With Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby, Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and Dr. Seonaid Valiant, Ayer Reference Librarian at the Newberry Library.
Exhibits with Schools and Tribal Departments
Instructors: Rita Lara and Eric Doxtater
This session includes concepts for creating small budget exhibits for local schools, tribal departments and other institutions. Rita and Eric will share their experiences. Participants are asked to bring ideas regarding exhibit opportunities in their respective areas. As a group, we will assist one another with ideas and recommendations on creating memorable exhibits.
Project Management Lite: Tools that can help you be more organized and efficient and work better with others
Instructor: Nicole MartinRogers*
In this hands-on session, participants will learn about the basic principles of project management, including the triple constraint of scope, timeline, and budget; using tools from the discipline of project management to organize, communicate about, and complete our work, such as work breakdown structures and Gantt charts; and resources for other ideas and tips for managing projects, such as templates, software, websites, etc. *The instructor is a regular person (NOT a certified project management professional) who has learned through practice how to pick and choose tools to modify to meet real-life project management and communication needs.
Participants will:
- Learn what project management is, why is essential, and how it will make your life easier
- Receive examples and templates of project management tools and how they are used in a real-life setting
- Understand how to develop and use simple project management tools to organize work and communicate it to others
- Gain confidence for trying and modifying project management tools to work for your specific needs
Classes
Classes are 4 hours long and will be on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Bringing Community Voices Into Exhibitions
Instructor: Holly Cusack-McVeigh
Museums and cultural centers acknowledge that community participation is key to developing successful exhibitions, but how do they engage community members and partner organizations in effective and meaningful ways? Through case studies and hands-on activities, students will explore models of participation that encourage a truly collaborative, community-based approach to exhibit development.
When you complete this session you will:
- have a better understanding of the collaborative approach to exhibit development;
- be able to identify ways to incorporate multiple perspectives;
- be familiar with strategies for identifying storyline ideas and organizing concepts;
- be able to identify key take-home messages;
- be familiar with techniques for community engagement and partnership building;
- be able to identify ways to enhance your museum’s role in the community;
- be able to integrate and apply knowledge of research techniques for content development;
- be able to generate ideas for building visitor participation into your existing exhibits;
- be able to identify outcomes and community benefits.
Describing Your Resources: Reasons and Tools
Instructors: Jolie Greybill and Lizzy Baus
One of the main purposes of a library, museum, or other cultural heritage organization is to inform its community and provide access to useful resources. Many institutions have extensive knowledge and/or artifacts about the local history, culture, and so on, and they exist to serve their local communities. But what is the best way to get that information from the basements and shelves of libraries and museums out to the community so that the local people know of its richness? Catalog it!
There is so much to be discussed within the big umbrella of CATALOGING. What do I need to describe? How should I describe it? What tools can I use to share the information? How do I know which tool or tools are right for me? How do I tell my community about my resources? And most importantly, how can I do all this without breaking the bank??
Join us for a class discussion and demonstration addressing these and more issues. We will begin the day with a seminar-style conversation about your resources, your needs, and your communities. Later in the class we will transition to some demonstration and hands-on experimentation with different free or cheap tools you can use to catalog your resources.
Digital Storytelling with Video
Instructor: Mike Wilson
Digital storytelling takes the traditional craft and attributes of telling stories and merges it with diverse digital media. As digital media replaces the storyteller, the media itself as well as well as the methods used to deliver it become integral to how, why, and when stories are told. Join us as we explore the tools and techniques of digital storytelling and its relationship to traditional methods of education and historic memory.
Fundraising and Budgeting Basics
Instructor: Sally Stanton
Fundraising and budgeting go hand-in-hand. In this class, learn about the basics of each and get started thinking about what is right for you and your organization.
You’re going to need funding for the programming associated with the traveling exhibition. OK, so you need funding, period. With digital technology and social media, fundraising has exploded beyond the usual special events and grants, to include online donation platforms like gofundme and Indiegogo, social media campaigns like Giving Tuesday, text-to-give mobile fundraising, and more. Are you ready? Can this work for your organization? What would you need to do and who would need to buy in to make it work? Or will the tried-and-true methods be a better fit for your potential donors? Fundraising is first about relationships. How do you go about building those? We’ll try to find answers to these questions in this session, and you’ll get hands-on practice assessing fundraising readiness and in researching potential funding sources.
Even before you start your fundraising, you need to know how much funding you will need to implement the programming. It’s hard to get excited about budgeting. Unless you’re a financial professional, chances are that creating budgets isn’t your idea of fun. But there really is something satisfying about figuring it all out in black and white. Don’t believe it? Come try it out for yourself. Budgeting is really just strategic planning, with numbers. From direct to indirect costs, in-kind revenues and expenses, and cost matches and cost-sharing to the key assumptions on which budgets are based, we’ll cover basic budgeting concepts, terms, and processes. A group budgeting exercise using common budgeting templates will give you hands-on experience as well as opportunities to learn from your colleagues and share knowledge about the process.
After taking this class, participants will be able to:
- Assess their institution’s readiness for fundraising or for adopting new fundraising techniques.
- Identify key stakeholders and resources needed to raise funds successfully using various methods.
- Research and identify potential new sources of funding, ideally for the traveling exhibition and associated programming, and understand how to begin developing those
- Understand basic budgeting concepts, terms, and processes, and apply them to a budget template.
Grant Writing: Elements and Strategies
Instructor: Sally Stanton
Good grant writing requires skill, creativity, determination, and exquisite attention to detail. Makes sense, doesn’t it? A great deal is riding on the outcome.
Grant writers are compelling storytellers. A well-written grant combines the best of technical and creative writing in a unique blend unlike anything else. As museum and library professionals, you work with stories every day. Learn to tell the story of your institution, project, and program so clearly and persuasively that grantmakers are eager to fund your work. We will explore together the basics of good grant writing, from overall strategy to sentence-level details. Rarely does anyone ever write a grant alone, so, using the proposed regional traveling exhibition as our project, we’ll take a team approach to creating succinct proposal narratives. Participants will learn the “Swiss Cheese” method of grant writing, which relieves stress and results in a better final proposal.
Writing a grant proposal, as participants will learn, serves as an excellent process for effective program design and planning. Participants will analyze and discuss sample grant proposals and then will be tasked with developing and drafting several sections of a typical grant proposal. Together we’ll experience the typical grant writing cycle of draft, review, revise, rinse, repeat. Ultimately we’ll critique our own product, brainstorm solutions to common grant writing dilemmas, and design an effective strategy for persuading our chosen grantmaker to select our proposal to fund.
After taking this class, participants will be able to:
- Effectively articulate the need/purpose of a project proposed for funding
- Select a persuasive strategy most effective for the chosen grantmaker
- Analyze and respond to a grantmaker’s guidelines/requirements
- Understand how to design/write the basic elements of a proposal clearly, concisely, and persuasively
Intellectual Property and the Native Cultural Center
Instructor: Miranda Belarde-Lewis
Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are tricky, and very specific aspects of Western law. They include patents, trademarks, and copyright – just to name a few. How can Native museums, libraries, archives and cultural centers use IPRs to assert the individual and community rights of tribal members and families who are represented in the collections? This workshop will go over the basics of IPRs, and will solicit examples from participants of when they had to use IPRs. The class will include a discussion of what types of IPRs we should be aware of when we create a traveling exhibition representing a large number of unique tribal communities.
Program Planning and Evaluation Office Hours
Instructors: Nicole MartinRogers and Sheila Brommel
Join Nicole and Sheila for open office hours, where they will provide individual technical assistance and consultation. Come with questions, dilemmas, and information and materials about your own projects in need of a logic model and/or evaluation, and the instructors will help with ideas, solutions, resources, troubleshooting, etc. Ask Omar if people sign up for time slots or how to make sure participants don’t need to wait, or if we should plan that participants will stay for the whole session to actually work on or develop a logic model or evaluation plan for their project
Participants will:
- Identify solutions to evaluation dilemmas
- Develop a logic model, evaluation plan, survey, or other evaluation tools for their specific project
Mukurtu CMS Site Building, Community Engagement and Virtual Exhibiting
Instructors: Lotus Norton-Wisla and Michael Wynne
Lotus Norton-Wisla and Michael Wynne from Washington State University’s Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation will share Mukurtu CMS and how it can be used to showcase digital collections while maintaining tribal cultural protocols. They will also demonstrate how Mukurtu Mobile can collect images, audio, video, and stories in the field and upload to any Mukurtu site. Mukurtu CMS promotes a community approach to digital heritage management integrating already established social and cultural systems with technological tools.
In this workshop, participants will get hands-on experience using Mukurtu CMS.
Participants will learn:
- Basic Mukurtu concepts
- Core functionality
- Step-by-step procedures to curate digital heritage items with Mukurtu CMS and
- Use of Mukurtu Mobile for on-location content creation.
Participants will have hands on lessons during the session. Laptops and iPads will be provided for activities, but participants can use their own laptops if desired.
Telling Your Story with Your Website
Instructors: Robin Amado and Jenny McBurney
An online presence is essential for institutions in the 21st century. Come to this hands-on workshop to learn about website creation and design to promote your institution and programs. In the morning, We will explore a variety of example websites. In the afternoon, we will create our own basic websites using the online tool Weebly. Your website could provide information on your institution, offer research guides for patrons, or showcase programs or our upcoming traveling exhibit! In addition, you’ll be provided with handouts and scripts to teach your community members how to create their own websites using Weebly.
Participants will:
- Be aware of the variety of free online tools available to create websites.
- Understand the importance of layout and design to convey information in an online environment
- Learn how to use the free digital tool Weebly to build a website.
- Be prepared to teach others how to create a website using Weebly.