‘Benchmarking in the East of England’ is an annual survey aimed at museums in the region that are accredited or working towards accreditation.
The purpose of the survey is to gather evidence to help demonstrate and prove the social and economic importance of museums both locally and regionally to funders and stakeholders and to provide museums with data to enable them to benchmark their performance.
What’s in it for museums?
- Advocacy – evidence to make the case for your social and economic value in order to sustain investment
- Performance benchmarking – consistent data to compare your museum’s operational context
- Informing strategy – knowing your operational context will support your business planning
- Fundraising – the data can be used as evidence to support funding applications or to express your value with the public
How to complete the survey
- All figures should be for the financial period 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016.
- If your museum operates on a different financial year to this, in the relevant section you will be able to provide financial information for your museum's normal financial year. However, please ensure all other data is for the period 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016.
- Please complete as many questions as possible. We know that sometimes providing an exact figure can be hard so if you do not have final data, please provide your best estimate.
- Questions marked with an asterisk are compulsory and require a response. If a question does not apply to your museum, or an answer to a particular question is not known then please specify this by adding N/A in the answer box.
- If the response to a particular question is 0 then please specify this rather than leaving it blank.
- We recommend downloading and reading the survey questions and gathering the data required before completing the on-line form. The survey questions are available to download here.
- If you are a museum service or trust that runs multiple museum sites you should have been contact separately regarding completing this survey. If not please email tom.newman@bristol.gov.uk
- Please complete and return the survey by 31st August 2016.
Questions about the survey
- The survey is being carried out by the South West Museum Development team on behalf of SHARE Museums East.
- If you have any questions about completing the survey you can contact tom.newman@bristol.gov.uk.Thank you for taking the time to complete this form and we look forward to sharing the results with you.