Phase two case study: Involving external knowledge in your team

The Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), Denmark’s national gallery, felt that digitisation of the museum’s collection would benefit specific user groups. With this in mind SMK started an initiative to open up its digital collection: SMK Open.

As part of SMK Open a workshop was hosted during Copenhagen’s Young People's Meeting, a public event for 15-25 year olds to foster democratic engagement. The goal of the workshop was to use open art as a tool to work with difficult emotions and increase empathy towards others. SMK was interested in the impact of the workshop on its participants and decided to develop an impact assessment.

Early on in the development of the impact assessment the team of SMK Open chose to involve external experts. This was quickly decided after the team critically reflected on their own role and ability to objectively assess their own work. “People who are close to the project plan and its ambitions are not necessarily the ones who are best equipped to figure out how to assess its impact,” according to Merete Sanderhoff, curator and Senior Advisor of SMK’s Digital Museum Practice. 

Although Sanderhoff herself was very involved in the event, she did not want to both create and evaluate the workshop herself: “You need to attempt to stay neutral during data collection and data analysis. I knew that I was too close to the project.”

Sanderhoff and her team decided to take a step back and involve other people with more distance to the workshop in the development of the assessment. They consciously involved people with different backgrounds. One expert was an experienced anthropologist, the other a senior researcher of User Experience within SMK who had not been part of the project. Together they developed most of the impact assessment. 

With guidance of the external experts, Sanderhoff and her team focused their support on the data collection process. The experts set up the research and developed the questionnaire. 

The SMK Open team contributed by conducting a number of interviews with stakeholders as part of the data collection strategy. Since it was important to compare the qualitative insights from the interviews, each interview had to be conducted in the same structured manner. Every interviewer therefore followed the same structure and guidelines that had been designed by the external experts. Working together in close collaboration the SMK Open team and external researchers increased the volume of data they collected, without compromising on its quality. 

Follow SMK’s journey and read the impact assessment undertaken on this event