Association of Children's Museums

The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) will develop a benchmarking calculator, a user-friendly tool for children’s museums professionals to produce on-demand reports of key performance indicators and ratios. ACM will work with an advisory committee and other partners to develop the calculator, train children’s museum professionals on its use in examining data to measure institutional performance against comparative groups of museums, and evaluate its impact on the field. The tool will initially be available to 318 children’s museums, and the project will serve as a prototype for a larger national effort to standardize data collection and reporting across the museum field. The detailed data analysis and interpretation provided by the benchmarking calculator will equip museum professionals to strengthen operations with a goal of building capacity and achieving institutional sustainability.