Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

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About Max van Balgooy

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

Apps Students Want

Artist's rendition of "The Past Speaks to Us" mobile app. From THE Journal.

Project Tomorrow asked students from kindergarten through high school to imagine their ideal mobile app for learning.  They received more than 200,000 responses and T.H.E. Journal highlighted fifteen of them that could transform student learning and take advantage of this budding technology in their November/December 2011 issue.  For museums and historic sites, here are the ones with most potential (as well as what’s happening currently in the field):

  • The Real Thing.  Suggested by a sixth grader in California:  “Some students have a hard time with subjects but they don’t want to ask teachers.  This app would let them watch videos or talk to real professionals about the subjects they are learning in school.”  Some institutions are already offering YouTube videos like this to explain the job of a curator or an expert’s view on a topic.
  • iMu-see-’em.  Suggested by an eighth grader in New Jersey:  “This app is at once a virtual planner, information database, and textbook archives.  It includes a three-dimensional model viewer for referencing subjects, like Continue reading →

Should Historic Sites Become Social Entrepreneurs?

Historic sites and house museums are increasingly being encouraged to think as much about the revenue as they do expenses, as much about profit as they do mission.  It’s often hard for non-profit organizations to embrace this movement–many are still stinging from the years when “business thinking” and MBAs were all the rage in the executive office.  Certainly economic sustainability is a goal (if we go out of business, who will do our good work?) but it doesn’t seem the usual models coming out of business schools is appropriate.  Perhaps it’s time to recognize that another model can be followed, one that combines mission and money along with a new set of performance measures.

“Social Entrepreneurship” and “For Benefit Corporations” may offer a new approach to managing historic sites, although it’s actually not that new.  It’s been around since the 1970s and one social entrepreneur–Muhammad Yunus for his microlending program through Grameen Bank–has received a Nobel Peace Prize.  In “Social Entrepreneurship and the Next Generation of Giving,” the Washington Post provides the latest summary of this type of organization as well as some advice:

  • Get the Right People Working on the Right Team:  “To drive a social innovation to scale, it takes Continue reading →

What’s Next in the Social Media Revolution?

"What's Next for Social Media" Forum at the National Archives.

The National Archives brought together a diverse panel of practitioners and critics of social media to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for communication with the public in, “What’s Next in the Social Media Revolution?” at its Seventh Annual William G. McGowan Forum on Communications on Friday, November 4.  A really informative (and free!) evening and for historic sites there were these particularly useful insights and recommendations:

  • Social media is not just for socializing, but can inform and motivate. Alex Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, provided a quick history of social media noting that many of them are very new (Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg launched in 2004; YouTube and Twitter in 2006) but the turning point was the Iran elections in 2009, which showed that the use of social media could have tremendous impacts on society.  My advice:  your organization may not have the capacity to use social media actively right now, but Continue reading →

Teaching History Through Inquiry

If you’ve ever worked with students, you know that lectures and PointPoint presentations are a sure way to kill any interest in history or historic places. In Teaching History Through Inquiry, Stephen Lazar, a social studies teacher at the Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn, lists six ways he engages high school students to provide cultural literacy and help them develop as critical thinkers:

  1. Carefully craft your questions.
  2. Engage students in examining evidence.
  3. Move on to more nuanced questions.
  4. Navigate myths with the inquiry approach.
  5. Identify helpful resources.
  6. Prepare critical thinkers.

You can find details of each of these points at TeacherMagazine.org, which is making this premium article available for free.  But let me add another point:

7.  Engage with the real thing:  use original documents, visit historic sites, look at objects, and examine historical photographs and maps.  Those experiences bring mind and eye (and perhaps heart) together in a way that’s not possible in textbooks and classrooms.

National Archives to Launch Dashboard to Engage Users

Pamela Wright of the National Archives describes the forthcoming Citizen Archivist Dashboard.

At the Seventh Annual William G. McGowan Forum on Communications on November 4, the National Archives previewed their Citizen Archivist Dashboard, a single place where users can actively participate in the work of the institution (the Archivist of the United States debuted it earlier in his blog). Pamela Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives, stated that this would be a way to develop deeper levels of engagement with its users beyond the basic performance measures of “likes” and “followers”. Scheduled to launch in December, it will use crowd-sourcing strategies to improve access and understanding of its enormous collections by allowing visitors to: Continue reading →

Claim Your Space on Google+ Pages

Yesterday, Google launched Google+ Pages worldwide, which expands their network from people to places.  Now historic sites, museums, galleries, organizations,  associations, and even advocacy campaigns can have a Page in Google+.  It’s similar to Facebook, but you have access to such Google+ features as:

  • email distribution lists (called Circles), which can help you build special interest groups around your collections or programs
  • group video chats (called Hangouts), which can help you hold meetings for up to 9 people
  • sending text messages as a group chat (called Messenger), handy if you’re coordinating a large event and need to communicate with everyone quickly.

Likewise, your members, users, and supporters will be able to more easily connect with you by adding you to their Circles, plus they can recommend your content on Google Search.

A number of pages are already available (Save the Children, Anderson Cooper 360, The All-American Rejects), but any organization will be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.  I’ve just created a Google+ Page for Engaging Places, but it’ll be fairly quiet until I better understand the possibilities (but I wanted to reserve my name before someone else takes it).

Upcoming Free Webinars for Historic Sites

The American Association for State and Local History is offering three free webinars that will particularly interest historic sites:  storytelling, interpretive planning, and engaging new audiences.  Thanks to an IMLS 21st Century Museum Professionals grant, webinar participation is free and open to staff, volunteers, board members of history organizations and anyone else interested in learning more about visitor engagement.  You can register for one, two, or all three!

Telling a Good Story

  • November 17, 2011
  • 2-3:15 pm Eastern
  • A good guided tour is a good story, told well, says guest speaker Linda Norris. Join us to explore telling stories to create Continue reading →

Learn How the Museum Assessment Program Can Help Your Site

The Museum Assessment Program is one of those program that’s been a major benefit to the field for decades, but unless you’ve participated, it’s a mystery.  You may have heard how it can transform an organization, move it to the next level of development, or solve a vexing situation.  It sounds dramatic, but I’ve seen it happen at both large and small museums who have gone through the process.

So how does this happen?  You can find out at a free webinar about MAP on Thursday, November 10 at 3pm Eastern Standard Time presented by the American Association of Museums and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  Registration isn’t required but Continue reading →

Best Practices for Community Engagement and Interpretation Available

For your convenience, I’ve pulled together in one page the various standards and best practices for community engagement, public education, and historical interpretation at historic places and by historical organizations, including scholarship, curriculum development, visitor research, and staff training, as well as the broad range of public programs presented by historic sites, from tours and exhibits to publications and the Internet.  You’ll find “Best Practices” as a topic on the navigation bar on EngagingPlaces.net.

These resources can be used to: Continue reading →

Is an Organizational Hybrid for Non-Profits and For-Profits on the Horizon?

In my work with historic sites, financially sustainability is one of the major challenges, and many are seeking advice from business leaders to increase their earned income.  It’s often an awkward situation because business owners don’t share the same values for preservation and history, and non-profits are uncomfortable with the risks associated with entrepreneurship.  Much time is spent explaining and defending various practices, and making decisions is incredibly slow.  But there may be an answer.  This month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review predicts that the growing desire to meld non-profit mission and for-profit entrepreneurship will create a new form of organizational structure:  the for-benefit enterprise.

For-benefits are a new class of organization.  Like non-profits, they can pursue a wide range of social missions.  Like for-profits, they can generate a broad range of products and services that improve quality of life for consumers, create jobs, and contribute to the economy.  Combining social and commercial ends is not new–think of hospitals, universities, arts organizations, Goodwill.  But the for-benefit model does much more than that.  It redefines fiduciary duty, governance, ownership, and stakeholder relationships in fundamental ways.

Author Heerad Sabeti calls this a fourth sector of the economy, distinct from government, non-profits, and commercial businesses, with the following characteristics: Continue reading →