The mission of the Rochester Museum & Science Center (RMSC) is to create a better world through inspiring curiosity, exploration, and engagement across history, science, culture, and the natural world. It combines a history/natural museum, science museum, planetarium, and nature center and has constantly evolved to serve the needs of the community in Western New York since 1912.
Long overdue for both, the RMSC elected to enter into strategic planning and campus master planning simultaneously. This decision inexorably linked the two processes together with the understanding that the organization could not approach a strategic plan without having a plan to upgrade the buildings, exhibitions, and campus, and could not approach a master plan process without understanding the needs of the changing community and developing the strategies to meet them.
This iterative, unconventional process required three groups—CambridgeSeven , Badfish Consulting and RMSC—to work together in consistent communication, museum and community-wide visioning, technical research into buildings and internal processes, stakeholder engagement, scenario planning, design, costing and phasing.
Project leads will share a case study of engaging Strategic Planning and Campus Planning as a single, concurrent process including the challenges, benefits, timelines and lessons learned in how to build momentum and urgency with the board, staff and community and government partners.
Learning Objectives
- Investigate the benefits, challenges and considerations of strategic planning and campus planning as a concurrent process in developing museum building projects
- Analyze the links between organizational strategy and built outcomes that will allow for rapid iteration around wide ranging scenarios that are common to many museums
- Plan a process to communicate, determine, visualize, and outline a framework for addressing pressing needs (like deferred maintenance, staff cohesion, visitor experience, etc.)
- Identify the role of interactive workshops for unlocking group decision making and collective ownership of ideas
- Apply the creative use of rich visualization to connect strategic intent, possible scenarios and initial ideas around built outcomes
