Organisational Health Check 2018-22

The Museums’ Organisational Health Check is a self-assessment tool for museums which is now being used across all of the English Regions by the Museum Development Network.

It is designed as an indicator to help you highlight your museum’s current best practice, understand where the museum has areas of development and to feed into your forward planning. This will enable you to prioritise areas of working over the next 12 months and provide you with a benchmark for future work.

It helps MDEM to provide bespoke support for your museum as well as tailored programmes and grants across the East Midlands which respond to the regional need. As such we are asking all Accredited museums int he region to complete the tool to access our support programmes and grant schemes over the next 12 months.

Therefore before the 1st September 2020 if you are an Accredited Museum in the East Midlands, we need you to:

Submit an Organisational Health Review (previously known as the Business Diagnostic) launched 13th July 2020

Invitations to complete the survey will be sent out to all Accredited museum or those working towards Accreditation. Museums can also access the tool directly themselves from this page at any point.

For many of you this will not be the first time you have used the tool formerly known as the Business Diagnostic, a list of all museums who have submitted a response in the past can be found here: Organisational Health Check 2018 Submissions

We will be sending previous response out to museums along with their invite, however if you would like a copy of this for your museum then please email Sarah.

Please note: We ask all museums to complete the tool within 6 weeks of receiving a grant. We also ask that it be completed ahead of application to any support programmes.

Guidance and information for completion

Please note there are no right or wrong answers or penalties for low scores, it is a self-assessment tool for your museum.

The Museums’ Organisational Health Check asks an overarching question about your museum’s Forward Plan and then addresses six themes:

Each theme is followed by several statements for you to score your organisation against between 0-4:

0: We don’t do this at all
1: We only do this a small amount
2: We’re okay at this
3: We’re good at this
4: We’re excellent at this

Covid-19 – due to the current outbreak of Coronavirus the Museums’ Organisational Health Check includes text boxes after each section. These are provided to capture information on how your museum is affected and provide context for your scoring.

Submitting your Organisational Health Check

We need one completed Museums’ Organisational Health Check from each museum. We need to you to submit your responses on our online survey platform which can be found here:

Organisational Health Check Online Form: https://wh1.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=159224228947

To help you with the process you can also download a word version of the form – please not however we will only accept online submissions. MDN Museums Organisational Health Check – guidance information and form

The questions need consideration by a cross section of your team and require involvement from someone managing your organisation, either a senior member of the team or someone from the governing body, as well as someone involved in operations, for example collections management, learning or front of house; these can be staff or volunteers. We recommend at least two people engage with the process, which should take no longer than 45 minutes to complete.

Consider each theme and the individual statements within it. It’s helpful at this stage to discuss with colleagues what a score of ‘4: We’re excellent at this ‘could look like for the museum and how your current practice matches up against it.

Next, discuss a possible score for the statement; can you think of evidence or real examples to support this score? When you have reached a consensus, record the score and move on to the next statement.

Once you have completed the scoring please complete the section within each theme to identify what your museum is doing really well and what you’d like to develop or improve.

Further Support:

To help you to complete the tool, Heather Lomas has, Organisational Health Consultant created a supporting film and PowerPoint presentation which can be viewed below. This is aimed at anyone completing the tool, and can be used in advance or whilst completing the online form.

You can view and download the supporting slides to the film which explain the process of completing the Health Check here: MDN Museums Organisational Health Check Support for Completion

If you are using the film which you complete the form, you can use this timing script to skip ahead to the relevant sections: Organisational Health Check Timing Script

Advisory report:

By completing the Museums’ Organisational Health Check you will receive a bespoke advisory report with a summary of your results and suggestions of where to access support in your highlighted areas of need. We expect a museum to receive this within 4 weeks of completing the online form.

If you have any questions about the tool, how to submit or previous submissions then please email sarah.hartshorne@leics.gov.uk.