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JEWISH MUSEUM MILWAUKEE
Community engagement was our primary focus throughout the various portions of our project. We've sought to create constructive conversation ranging from online forums to interactive exhibits. The underlying principle of everything we’ve done is to inspire collaboration and respect among diverse groups of people with diverse ideas.
OUR WORKÂ 2018-2019
We began our endeavor by primarily populating and developing an online forum for the JMM exhibit when it was current.
Next, we focused on researching existing museums and developing strategies we could use to help develop the next exhibit.
We analyzed our team's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, & Threats to minimize threats and harness opportunities.
For the following exhibit, we made an interactive map, a response piece, and social media posts for women's history month.
Here, we share what we learned and messages that we hope reach other civically engaged groups.
Here, we feature some of the articles and websites that gave us inspiration and guidance along the way.
ONLINE FORUM
Our work for the Hollywood Blacklist exhibit was to advance and expand conversation inspired by the exhibit. We worked to populate and advertise the online forum designed by the museum.
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After some struggle to get the community involved, we realized that the forum would've been more easily accessible from the main page. We adjusted our ideas to make a more user-friendly experience later in the exhibit. The forum can be found with the link below!
SWOT/TOWS ANALYSIS
We performed a SWOT and TOWS analysis to gain a better understanding of our stakeholders and ourselves. This required us to look at our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, & threats that we faced and determine how we can best utilize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses.
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We found that our group’s strengths came from being comprised of a well-rounded and competent team allowing for innovative brainstorming, the formation of diverse ideas, and a level of technological competence. Our weaknesses stemmed from our lack of funding and lack of experience related to the inner-workings of museums. Additionally, our members didn’t have much design and marketing experience, which led to difficulty in marketing for the Museum. The opportunities presented to our group came in the form of our willing partners and their resources, giving us much creative freedom. The threats to our team was that museum draws mostly older people from the community because they lack a prominent online presence to intrigue and draw in a younger audience. The museum exterior is also bleak and semi-hidden away, leading to fewer people being drawn in to visit. Overall, the lack of time before exhibits opened caused us to have to work faster which led to more difficulty.
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After our SWOT analysis, we performed a TOWS analysis to determine how we can apply our strengths and weaknesses to our opportunities and threats in order to maximize our opportunities and minimize our threats. When applying our strengths we found that our opportunities allowed us to create unique events and creative ideas that were easily reviewed and worked well with the Museums resources. With our threats, our strengths allowed us to focus on different ways to market the museum and attract new visitors to the museum by strengthening their online presence and making the exhibit appealing enough to promote word-of-mouth marketing. When considering our weaknesses, our opportunities showed that we should split into subgroups in order to arrange meetings more easily and have a stronger focus on a specific task. When looking at our threats in terms of our weaknesses we found that we could minimize both through starting a social media campaign to help spread the word online and trying to implement more younger generation friendly features in the exhibit in order to appeal and attract a younger audience.
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Below is our early brainstorming for the SWOT portion in tabular format.
INTERACTIVE MAP
Three group members designed and built an interactive map for the museum, stemming from a concept generated in one of our precedent studies. After presenting the concept to the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, they were intrigued by the possibility of an interactive map to tie the exhibit together. They worked quite a few late nights and had to learn a few new tricks, but ultimately ended up delivering the finished project before the new exhibit was opened.
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The interactive map was presented on a touch screen display at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee as a part of their Pictures of Resistance exhibit and allowed visitors to explore important cities, and events of WWII. The map also displays important events of Faye's story in WWII, the main focus of the exhibit.
Click below to interact with our map!
To ensure that the map loads properly, please use Google Chrome.
Created by Seth Kooiker, Andrew Kempen, and Darrian Garrett.
RESPONSE PIECE & WOMEN'S HISTORY
Our remaining group members brainstormed ideas for a unique exhibit response piece and others developed social media posts about influential women for Women's History Month.
The final idea for the response piece was to hang blank polaroids from clotheslines since the exhibit specifically featured photography.
Group members that focused on women's history featured impressive figures such as Golda Meir, Malala Yousafzai, and Sonia Sotomayor on social media.
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PROCESS & RESULTS
Below you can find an infographic detailing the general process of our group as well as a brief discussion of our results and a few lessons we learned.
Although we are very happy with the end products developed throughout the course of the project, there is always room for improvement. For one, discussion on the Hollywood Blacklist exhibit online forum remained rather sparse. Despite our best efforts to foster conversation on the topics presented on the page, there were few responses or comments from people outside of our group. This could have been due to a variety of issues, most notably the difficulty involved in navigating to the page and generally low user-friendliness. In the future, we would definitely try redesigning the page to make it more intuitive and easier to find on the website. Though the page was not as successful as we would have hoped, a key takeaway we took from the experience is that it is important to put significant effort into designing a page well if you would like people to easily find your page and participate on it.
The second major portion of our project for the Jewish Museum related to their Pictures of Resistance Exhibit. The three main tasks we accepted were to brainstorm ideas for a response piece for the exhibit, research and develop social media posts for women’s history month, and to build an interactive map for the exhibit. Learning from our mistakes of the first comment page, we spent a lot of time developing the map, going to great lengths to ensure it looked visually attractive and was easy and intuitive to navigate and use. Although this ended up being a lot more work than expected, the end product was very high quality because of the time spent developing it. As a result, it was a huge success, surpassing the expectations of the Jewish Museum. The museum also used our social media posts throughout March, and was excited to implement one of our response piece ideas, which has been popular with museum guests. Learning from this experience, it is clear that it is important to spend that extra time and effort in initial design and development to produce high quality and successful end products.
Another important lesson that we all learned is that with passion and dedication there is no limit to community involvement. None of us being Jewish, we were a little unsure of what we could really do to help a Jewish museum at the start of the year, but we would all agree that it was a great, inspirational experience and that the cultural barrier did very little to bar us from getting involved.
OUR MEMBERS
GRACE CUSHING
I am a Civil Engineering Major with a specialty in water resources and environmental engineering. I am involved in SUB, Student Government, and a part of the Lambda Zeta Nu sorority. Being a part of the honors program allowed me to really understand what servant leadership meant. I was able to better my leadership and communication skills while working with the Jewish Museum. It was really awesome to see how grateful community partners are about working with young, excited, and creative college students like us. We were able to bring new ideas from our own perspectives, and our partners were super receptive to them!