For museums, historical societies, botanic gardens & zoos
Your walls end.
Your museum doesn’t.
Your curators, educators, and registrars are the specialists — we’re not here to second-guess any of them. We’re geographers and planners who add the one lens most museum staffs don’t have in-house: the terrain your institution actually sits in. You know the collection. We know the four blocks around it, and we stay to carry the plan through them.
- Your building
- What your data sees
- What we work in
Create
Strategic plans, audience research, and community-set priorities — built alongside your staff, from fieldwork we conduct.
Implement
Owners, quarters, and the standing review that keeps the plan moving between exhibitions.
Measure
Baselines at launch, re-measurement mid-cycle, and evidence a funder and a board both accept.
Geographers and planners — AICP and PMP — working with museums, historical societies, gardens, and zoos. We do the research ourselves rather than subcontracting it, which is why the plan and the evidence agree with each other.
Six problems we get called about
Name the one you’re living with. Here’s how a spatial lens cracks it.
These are real, they’re common, and none of them mean anyone did their job badly. What they have in common is that each is usually treated as a marketing, programming, or willpower problem — and each one turns out to have a geography underneath it. Pick the one that sounds like your Monday.
What you’re hearing
“Attendance is flat, and we’ve tried everything on the marketing side.”
Why it’s hard to solve from inside
Marketing optimizes for conversion, which means it works hardest on people who already know you exist. When the ceiling is structural, more spend finds the same audience faster.
The spatial lens on it
Flat attendance is usually a catchment that stopped growing, not interest that stopped existing.
We draw travel-time catchments from each entrance across the real street and transit network, then compare who lives inside them against who actually shows up. The gap almost always concentrates somewhere specific — a corridor, a school district, a set of blocks past a hard edge — and that is a solvable, fundable problem rather than a vague one.
What lands on your desk
- A catchment map showing reachable population versus actual visitors
- The two or three geographic gaps worth pursuing first, with population counts
- A short list of access changes ranked by cost against people reached
A spatial lens isn’t a substitute for curatorial or education judgment — it’s the layer underneath it. Once you can see the terrain, most of these stop being arguments about priorities and start being decisions with an obvious answer.
Implementing the strategic plan · the specialty
A plan is not an exhibition. It doesn’t close.
Most museums we meet have a good plan already — well facilitated, board-approved, genuinely ambitious. Then a capital campaign, a hire, and two exhibitions happen, because that is what a working museum does. The plan didn’t fail; it just never had anyone whose job was carrying it. That’s the role we take. Drag through the cycle: left is the plan as a document, right is the plan with someone accountable for it.
Year 1 after adoption
Plan as document
Adoption: a press release, a PDF, and a staff retreat people genuinely enjoyed.
Plan as practice — with us
Adoption, an implementation calendar with named owners, and the baseline measurement collected while the plan is still warm.
Owners and quarters
Every commitment gets a name and a due quarter. Anything that can take neither is a value rather than a commitment — worth naming as such early, not at year four.
The quarterly review
Ninety minutes with staff, four times a year, plus one page to the board. That rhythm is the entire difference between a plan and a practice.
Honest retirement
Some initiatives turn out to be wrong, which is a sign the plan was ambitious. Setting one down deliberately, with a written reason, protects the credibility of the ones still live.
The handoff
By year three your staff run the reviews and the research themselves. We stay on call. The plan should not depend on us being in the room.
We’re still there in year three, when the plan has to compete with a leaking roof and a traveling show.
The work, laid out as a floor plan
Six rooms. Walk them in any order.
Each is a discrete engagement. You don’t have to buy the whole building.
Entrance at lower centre. The atrium in the middle is where every one of these meets.
—
Everything here connects.
One body of research can ground all of it: the strategic plan, the interpretive plan, the NEH or IMLS narrative, the campaign case statement, and the commitments you have already made publicly. These usually get commissioned separately, in different years, by whoever had budget — so the numbers drift apart. Built once, they agree.
On view in this room
- One research base, reused across plan, grants, and campaign case
- One implementation calendar, so departments stop running parallel plans
- One measurement framework, so year-five comparison is possible
- One set of definitions, so “community” means the same thing in every document
- Pick any room to see the work in detail
Attendance is a turnstile number. It cannot tell you who chose not to come.
Your admissions total, member count, and school bookings are all real and all useful — and every one of them describes someone who already decided you were for them. The person who drove past, or came once in 2019, or has never been told the collection includes their family, isn’t in any report you have. They’re the majority, and reaching them is field research rather than analytics. That’s the half we’re built for.
Who actually arrives
Nine thresholds between a curious person and your second gallery.
Switch on the thresholds that are true for your museum and watch the reachable audience narrow. None of these is about interest in your collection — each is a design decision made years ago, usually for a sound reason at the time, and each is reversible. This demonstrates the logic; the real version comes from your own visitor data and a week in your lobby.
100%
of a genuinely interested local public is still plausibly reachable
- Still reachable
- Filtered out by a threshold
Nothing switched on — every interested person in your region can plausibly reach you. No museum is in this position, which is why the exercise is worth doing honestly.
Most of these cost less to change than a single exhibition. The hard part is that nobody has written them down in one place — so we do that, then go ask the people on the outside of them what would actually help.
Data collection & visitor research — done by us
You wouldn’t accession an object without a condition report.
Your field already applies that rigor to objects. We bring the same standard to what gets collected about people — designing the instruments, fielding them ourselves, doing the analysis, and handing findings back to the communities that gave them. Tap a method to see what it involves.
Our framework
Unintended: A Data Practice
Six critical points and eighteen questions for anyone about to collect data on a community. We wrote it because we have watched a participant’s quote become the justification for cutting their program three years later.
Why museums in particular
Yours is a field already thinking hard about how records were made about people who never consented to them — often further along on this than the consultants who show up. We’re not here to introduce the idea; we’re here with a method that holds that line while still producing evidence a funder, a board, and a city council will accept.
Two ways in
We run it. Or we teach your staff to run it.
Door one · Consulting engagement
Hire the practice for the cycle.
We create the plan, implement alongside your staff, and measure it — one team from catchment analysis through the funder report. You get the research, the calendar, the quarterly reviews, and the evidence. Scoped so a board can approve it without a formal procurement, and phased so the first deliverable lands before your next fiscal year.
Typically 6–18 months · Board-approvable scope
Museum staff are already good at close looking, so teaching them to interview is a shorter distance than most consultants assume.
Let’s read your catchment together.
Tell us where you are — writing a plan, mid-way through one, or assembling what a funder is asking for. We’re in Chicago, we scope small when small is right, and the first conversation costs nothing.
Find your problem here
Remember
Your walls end. Your museum doesn’t.
We create it, we implement it, we measure it — one team, from the catchment analysis through the funder report, still in the room in year three.
Let’s read your catchment together.
Bring us a plan waiting on capacity, a funder asking for evidence, or the neighborhood your attendance report has never described.