Plains Art Museum

Purpose: Serving as Centers of Community Engagement The Plains Art Museum is a long-standing Fargo-Moorhead community institution that was transformed in 1997 when it relocated to historic downtown Fargo. Its vision is to become an art museum that is valued by the region, accredited, and recognized nationally for its work. Its audience development efforts aim toward broadening (attracting more people), deepening (increasing current participants' levels of involvement), and diversifying (attracting different kinds of people). In this project, the museum will work with a consultant to create a long-term audience development plan and prepare to implement the plan on the basis of sound market research and to better integrate audience development into its standard operating procedures. Project activities will include planning (review existing data gaps and develop a survey instrument); research (survey museum attendees and conduct focus groups); findings and recommendations (with input from the consultant and the community); skill building (training sessions to build the institution's long-term research and evaluation capacity); and evaluation (develop an evaluation rubric at the start of the project, then collect measurements throughout the project and interview project participants).