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Measuring What Matters: Vital Signs for Museums

By Laura Freebairn-Smith & Leah Hancock

More numbers don’t equal more insight. If your dashboard feels more like a data dump than a decision-making tool, you’re probably measuring too much. And if you don’t have a dashboard, well, read on. Museums are no strangers to …
K-12 STEM Education, Museums, and Perceived Curricular Gaps: A 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Story

By Susie Wilkening

This visual Data Story is based on findings from the 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, a national survey of American museum visitors from AAM and Wilkening Consulting. Every year, the survey partners with individual museums to research …
Visitation Recovery Trends from the Pandemic: A 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Story

By Susie Wilkening

This visual Data Story is based on findings from the 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, a national survey of American museum visitors from AAM and Wilkening Consulting. Every year, the survey partners with individual museums to research …
Inclusive Content in an Uncertain Time: A 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Story

By Susie Wilkening

This visual Data Story is based on findings from the 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, a national survey of American museum visitors from AAM and Wilkening Consulting. Every year, the survey partners with individual museums to research …
The Four-Day Workweek: A Q&A with Taft Museum of Art CEO Becky Beaulieu

By Adam Rozan

Maybe you’ve heard the quote “the only constant is change,” which I believe is true. Change is always happening, so much so that life and work often feel more topsy-turvy than constant. For a while, the constant change we lived with was in …
Three Questions to Rethink Volunteering

By Joseph O'Neill

As Elizabeth Merritt outlines in this year’s edition of TrendsWatch, volunteering in the United States is in a funk. Participation rates have slumped for decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought even sharper declines. Whether you …
Designing and Implementing a Counterspace: The Burke Museum’s Research Family

By Rachael L. G. Tamngin

In the spring of 2013, a group of Pacific Islander students at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle created the first version of an initiative known as Research Family. As its name implies, Research Family brings family-like …
Demographics of US Museum-Goers: 2025 Update

By Jessica Strube

This visual Data Story is based on findings from the 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, a national survey of American museum visitors from AAM and Wilkening Consulting. Every year, the survey partners with individual museums to research …
Membership Motivations and Barriers: An Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Story

By Susie Wilkening

This visual Data Story is based on findings from the 2021 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, a national survey of American museum visitors from AAM and Wilkening Consulting. Every year, the survey partners with individual museums to research …
Now Available: On-Demand Sessions from AAM 2025

By American Alliance of Museums

Couldn’t make it to Los Angeles this spring for the AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo? Wishing you could replay a session that’s been on your mind ever since? Good news! A select number of recorded sessions are now available …