Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

About Max van Balgooy

President of Engaging Places LLC, a design and strategy firm that connects people to historic places.

Failed Organizational Culture at Goldman Sachs Suggests Remedies for Non-Profits

Greg Smith’s public departure from Goldman Sachs after a dozen years is one of the hottest pages of the New York Times today and while I tend to ignore the personnel matters of Wall Street (oh, another tycoon getting/losing/complaining about a bonus that’s more than the value of my house), reading his statement startled me. So many of his concerns about the organization’s culture are shared by me and many of my colleagues in the museum and historic preservation fields:

1. The overriding pursuit of money that’s out of balance with mission or ethics. Smith describes a staff meeting at Goldman Sachs:

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

Gosh, if this bothers someone at a financial investment firm, shouldn’t the lack of discussion about fulfilling mission and vision really bother the board and staff at a non-profit organization? And yet most meetings Continue reading →

Teaching History Without Textbooks? Stanford Proves It’s Possible.

In 2008, Stanford University introduced “Reading Like a Historian,” a non-traditional history curriculum to five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. According to Sam Wineburg, who directs the Stanford History Education Group and has been a longtime proponent of revising the teaching of history, “We need to break the stranglehold of the textbook by introducing students to the variety of voices they encounter in the past through primary sources.” It seems this new curriculum is doing that and more, as recently reported in Futurity:

There are no orderly rows of desks in Valerie Ziegler’s 11th-grade history class—students sit in groups of three or four at small tables around the room. There also is no lectern because there are no lectures. And perhaps most striking, there are no textbooks.

These students at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco learn about the Vietnam War, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the Great Depression, and other major events in U.S. history by analyzing journal writings, memoirs, speeches, songs, photographs, illustrations, and other documents of the era.

“I always tell my students they’re historians-in-training, so the work we do in here is that of a historian,” Ziegler says.

That sounds like fun, but does it have any impact? Continue reading →

Collections Chat on NEH’s Preservation Assistance Grants

"Skeleton Room" at the Smithsonian Institution, ca. 1890.

On Monday, March 12 at 1 pm Eastern, the Connecting to Collections
Online Community will host another live chat in their series. Join Elizabeth Joffrion, Senior Program Officer in the National Endowment for the Humanities’
Division of Preservation and Access to learn about Preservation Assistance Grants. She will review what Preservation Assistance Grants fund, share tips on making a strong application, and answer your questions. No preregistration is required;
on Monday at 1 pm EDT just go to http://www.connectingtocollections.org/meeting and log in.

National Endowment for the Humanities’ Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-sized institutions—such as historic sites, museums, historical societies, cultural organizations, Continue reading →

Haas-Lilienthal House completes Sustainability Management Plan

Haas-Lilienthal House

The Haas-Lilienthal House in San Francisco has just completed a Sustainability Management Plan, which will help them meet energy and sustainability goals while preserving its character-defining and historically significant features. Through this plan, they’ve established a goal of reaching LEED Gold, however, there’s a “stretch goal” to reach “net zero.” Many people think that historic house museums are unable to meet any “green ratings” without compromising their preservation goals, however, recent achievements by President Lincoln’s Cottage and others show it’s possible. The Haas-Lilienthal House is owned and operated by San Francisco Archiectural Heritage, a city-wide preservation organization, so plans like this not only provide a road map for greening the maintenance procedures and capital building improvements to save money and energy, but advance their position that historic preservation is relevant and historic buildings can perform as well as modern ones.

The plan was developed by Barbara Campagna, FAIA, LEEP AP, a former colleague of mine at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she was actively involved Continue reading →

Historian Named One of the the Year’s Top Tech Innovators

The Chronicle of Higher Education just named Dr. Daniel Cohen one of academia’s top Tech Innovators for 2012 for his innovative approaches to employing digital tools in research and teaching. Is he a computer scientist, business professor, or cognitive psychologist? Nope, he’s an historian of 19th century science and religion, not a typical place where you’d expect to find someone on technology’s cutting edge. Nice to turn the tables on those who believe history is just about the past and has little to offer the future. Think again.

Dan Cohen is an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History and director of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia. He is the co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History. If that isn’t enough, he is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship.

To learn more about the work being done by Cohen and others at the center to preserve history through the use of digital media, read “Presenting and Preserving the Past Through Digital Media” in Mason Research and “A Digital Humanist Puts New Tools in the Hands of Scholars” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

HBR: What Virals Ads can Tell Us About Engaging Visitors

Evian's Roller Babies commercial demonstrates what makes an ad go viral.

The March 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review focuses on U. S. business competitiveness in the world and won’t interest most readers of EngagingPlaces.net, however, there are a few smaller stories scattered around that are relevant. Thales Texiera’s article on “The New Science of Viral Ads” lays out five techniques that encourage people to watch and share their commercials (in other words, “go viral”) and I’ve modified three of them to address the needs of visitors at historic sites:

Play down the logo, play up the brand. If your logo is too dominant or intrusive, visitors will be turned off by this obvious attempt to manipulate them. A few places are fine and expected (e.g. letterhead, entrance sign, mugs in the store) but I’ve visited sites where a logo is on every sign, including the one pointing to the bathroom. It may make your board happy, but it’ll turn off your visitors. Instead, unobtrusively weave your brand (not logo) throughout the visitor experience. Texiera uses Coca-Cola’s “Happiness Factory” ad as an example (how was the Coca-Cola logo used?).
Create joy and surprise right away. Visitors stay engaged in large part if they encounter joy or surprise. So in tours, for example, add an element of joy or surprise into the introduction rather than saving it only for the conclusion. Each site will need to figure this out for themselves, but it can be a surprising fact or an earnest welcome. Bud Light’s “Swear Jar” ad is an example of delivering humor and surprise to maintain viewers’ interest (and just a warning, this ad may offend some people and because it promotes the drinking of alcohol, you’ll need to register as an adult on YouTube to view it).
Build an emotional roller coaster. Just as in a good novel, the rhythm or flow helps carry the visitor along and keeps them engaged with fresh twists and turns. Tours too often are presented as just one fact/object/room after another. Instead of building a tour solely on cognitive elements (e.g. facts, names, and dates), integrate some affective ones (e.g., humor, surprise, suspense, drama, fun)–just make sure it’s appropriate, authentic, and based on fact. Evian’s “Roller Babies” cuts between scenes for an emotional roller coaster of continual surprises. With more than 50 million views on YouTube, it’s a major hit.

For more, read Thales Texiera’s article on “The New Science of Viral Ads” online or watch the five-minute interview that accompanies the story.

More Than 300 Museum Supporters on Capitol Hill

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Congress was visited by more than 300 leaders in the museum field on Tuesday for the fourth annual Museums Advocacy Day. The day started with welcoming messages and packets of key issues, and then off we went for meetings with our senators and congressmen. The delegation from Maryland was huge with about two dozen people and met with staff for Senator Cardin and Senator Mikulski, who were very open to our requests to support funding for the Office of Museum Programs of the Institute of Museum and Library Services; including museums among the approved partners for schools in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; and opposing elimination of the tax deductibility of charitable donations. Congressman Chris Van Hollen, who represents my district, was incredibly generous with his time and came out to talk with us between votes in the House chamber.

Meeting with my senators and congressman to talk about the value of museums was a great experience, although it’s unclear how much can be accomplished in this bitter election year. More eye opening were the hundreds of people who were also wandering the halls to advocate for their cause, so we’ve got lots of competition. If we don’t participate, others will step in and happily take our place.

Museums Advocacy Day is coordinated by the American Association of Museums, and anyone is welcome to participate.

Lodging in Historic Canal Houses Garners State Award

C & O Canal National Historical Park in Maryland

The Maryland Historical Trust, the state agency that preserves and interprets Maryland’s history, recently presented an Outstanding Stewardship award to the National Park Service and the C & O Canal Trust for its Canal Quarters Program, which allows the public to stay overnight in many of the historic lock houses adjacent to the towpath. NPS acquired the 184-mile long Chesapeake and Ohio Canal with 1,300 historic structures, and figuring out what to do with all of them has been a challenge for decades. Partnering with the nonprofit C & O Canal Trust, NPS developed a new model for adaptive reuse that allows visitors to stay overnight while traveling along the canal. Although the buildings are among the park’s primary historic “artifacts”, many were vacant and only served as “scene setters” for the park’s four million annual visitors. The resulting program not only preserves the buildings, but also allows them to be used in a way that creates a memorable experience for visitors (and probably earns some new revenue!). Congratulations on a fine idea and getting it implemented despite the bureaucracy of the federal government!

Learn more at “Maryland Historical Trust honors program offering lodging in C&O Canal lock houses” in the Washington Post (February 27, 2012).