Looda – Looking for Datas

Looda – Looking for Datas is a European project resulting from the collaboration between two children’s museums, the MUBA in Milan and Sladovna in Pisek (Czech Republic), Hands-On! International, the European network of children’s museums, and BAM! Strategie Culturali.

The project was proposed in the form of a small-scale partnership, an innovation introduced by the Erasmus+ programme for the 2021–2027 seven-year period in order to encourage the participation of small- and medium-sized organisations.

The project aimed to strengthen the knowledge and skills of museum staff in the field of impact assessment, in line with the European priority of “inclusion and diversity”. It explored the effects that museum experiences can have on children and families, and identified the indicators and tools required to measure the extent to which the intended impact objectives were achieved.

Although this approach focuses primarily on children’s museums, it can also be applied to any museum that offers activities, educational resources and learning programmes aimed at younger visitors.

Measuring the impact of exposure to and participation in cultural activities on children and families is a complex task. It requires a thorough understanding of the potential effects and enabling conditions, as well as the development of bespoke tools for data collection, while addressing the inherent challenges involved.

The project provides a toolkit for museums, including children’s museums and institutions offering activities, outreach initiatives and educational programmes for younger audiences. The toolkit supports the collection and organisation of data for social and cultural impact analysis, while establishing a foundation for evaluation and enabling comparisons between data gathered by organisations across Europe.

Following a training course on impact assessment, developed specifically for the project by BAM! Strategie Culturali, the partnership identified the Theory of Change as the methodology on which to base the structure of the data collection system used to assess the impact on children and families.

The impact chain was developed during working sessions held at MUBA and Sladovna. In practice, change objectives were defined for each beneficiary group — children aged 0–3, 3–6, 7–10 and 11–13, as well as parents, teachers and policy-makers — before working backwards to identify the preconditions required to achieve them, including the expected effects and outcomes. The partnership then identified the most suitable indicators for measuring impact and developed a range of data collection tools, including questionnaires, focus groups, observation grids and more creative methods, such as diaries for children and parents.

This valuable “toolkit“, now available to museum professionals, enables museums to collect data on a regular basis in support of ongoing impact assessment.

The outcome is a new booklet bringing together the map of change developed by the project team — a valuable resource not only for children’s museums, but for all cultural institutions seeking to design family activities in a more informed and purposeful way.