National Army Museum research
We worked with the National Army Museum on two projects to support a Stage Two bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund. The museum aims to completely redevelop its Chelsea site and transform its offer for both online and offline audiences through the ambitious Building for the Future project.
Emma led a team composed of interviewer Dr Tracy Craggs and online learning specialist Alison Glew to deliver two pieces of research:
- A series of focus groups for the museum's marketing department with specialist audiences to understand their perceptions of the current offer, their views on the plans for reinterpreting the collections and how the museum can build closer relationships with them in the future. We delivered four focus groups with veterans, currently serving soldiers, members of the museum's Friends organisation and representatives from other regimental museums to identify their current perceptions of the museum's offer and their future needs, and submitted a comprehensive report to the museum that will inform the HLF bid going forward.
- A larger scale research project for the museum's learning team to understand the needs of teachers and work with them to evaluate pilot projects to help the museum develop its future offer. We delivered initial focus groups with three sets of teachers - users, potential users and non-users - to find out what they need from the museum, both on site and in terms of online learning. We subsequently worked with the museum to evaluate a pilot learning offer at two schools in London and Wakefield to translate some of our initial findings into action and gain teachers' and students' input into the development of a new e-learning resource. In addition we held a development evening for teachers at the museum to enable them to use and give feedback on the museum's approach to collections-based content online. We submitted two detailed reports to the museum together with two short films that give a flavour of the schools pilots and the development evening.
Evaluation and Consultation
Evaluation is a key tool to help you understanding the impact of what you do and improve your service to users. Emma King Consultancy conducts all kinds of user research, from small scale research projects to ongoing impact assessments handling qualitative and quantitative data.
We can help you to:
- Understand what evaluation can do for you
- Plan an effective evaluation strategy for your project or programme
- Devise a practical evaluation framework to work from
- Design and deliver qualitative and quantitative data collection methods including evaluation forms, face to face and telephone interviews, online surveys, focus groups and visitor observation
- Analyse and write up findings and recommendations in a clear, practical and useable way