Engaging your Community | Ontario Museum Association

Engaging your Community: A Toolkit for Museums

The toolkit outlines a process through which individual museums can work with the community to assess their relevance and create a plan to deepen their relationship with the community, in turn increasing the sustainability of the museum.

Download the FULL TOOLKIT

Step by Step

Click the links below to download specific materials from the toolkit as your Working Group progresses through the Engaging your Community process.

	Contents and Overview
	Assemble a Working Group Form a Working Group that represents several kinds of people involved in the museum, including staff, board members, and volunteers. The goal of the Working Group is to help steer the museum through the Engaging your Community process.
	Find a Facilitator Find a Facilitator or choose a Team Leader. A skilled facilitator ensures that your ideas and action items are documented and helps your group stay focused on the discussion and results, rather than getting bogged down by the process.
	Working Group Orientation Orient your Working Group to the purpose in undertaking the Engaging your Community process, discuss the goals of the group and get aligned, and schedule the sessions and meetings for the duration of the project.
	Group Self-Assessment The self-assessment phase is a time for examining, reflecting, delving into and understanding what you are currently doing and how that helps or hinders developing a closer relationship with your community. It is a time to take stock, celebrate successes, and re-energize to build capacity for future opportunities.
	Community Consultation The community consultation is a time for aligning the museum’s mission, programs and services with the community’s objectives to achieve mutual goals. Museums should serve and be responsive to their community, and by strengthening the relationship between the museum and the community, the museum is more likely to be relevant, ensure ongoing support, and be sustainable in the long term.
	Option A: Community Conversations Option A: Community Conversations (Short Version)
	Option B: Serious Play
	Option C: Visioning Change
	Plan for the Future It’s now time to take all of the outputs and learnings garnered throughout the Engaging your Community: process and turn it into an action plan.
	Bibliography
Toolkit Resources
	Terms of Reference - Template
	How to Find a Facilitator
	Possible Triggers
	Community Engagement
	Group Self-Assessment STEP 2 Spider Diagram
	Community Consultation Generating Ideas for Who to Invite Inviting People to the Table Invitation Template
	Case Studies LatimerNOW REMAKE
	Idea Worksheet
	Wheel of Engagement
	Community Scattegories
	Community Scan Questions
	Engagement Mapping Tool
	Action Plan Work Sheet

Questions?

Mary Collier, Professional Development Program Manager

pd@museumsontario.ca

Tel. 416 348-8672 - Toll-free. 1-866-OMA-8672

This initiative is part of the museumsuccession project funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

The museumsuccession Project was developed to strengthen Ontario’s museum sector by enhancing governance, fostering stronger relationships between museums and their communities as well as supporting Emerging Museum Professionals.