Helping the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum transform attendance, membership, and donor data into actionable insights.
Overview
The Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum serves over 300,000 visitors each year. Museum staff wanted an easier way to understand visitor engagement, membership activity, and donor trends so they could make more informed decisions.
Problem
The museum's attendance, membership, and donor information was spread across multiple datasets.
This made it difficult to monitor visitor trends, understand membership growth, identify donor opportunities, and support outreach decisions.
Goal
My Role
Process
We interviewed museum staff to understand their reporting challenges.
Validated visitor, membership, and donor data.
Created reusable datasets and optimized queries.
Built attendance, membership, and donor dashboards.
Collected client feedback and refined visualizations.
Delivered dashboards, documentation, and training.
Dashboard 1
What it shows: donor frequency, net donations, days since last gift, and groups that may need reactivation.
Key Insight: The data shows a strong active base and a long-term lapse segment that may benefit from reactivation efforts.
Dashboard 2
What it shows: memberships month to date, sales channels, and overlap between members and donors.
Key Insight: Most members purchase in person and do not contribute outside membership costs, creating an opportunity for donor growth.
Dashboard 3
What it shows: family events, school attendance, field trip attendance, seasonal patterns, and year-over-year trends.
Key Insight: The museum can prioritize high-yield family programming while tracking an upward field trip trend into May 2026.
Design Decisions
Results
Impact
The dashboards help museum staff monitor visitor engagement, improve outreach efforts, identify underserved communities, support fundraising, and make faster, data-informed decisions.
What I Learned
Skills Used
Reflection
This project taught me that effective dashboards are more than attractive visualizations—they are decision-making tools. By collaborating with museum staff, our team transformed complex datasets into accessible insights that support community engagement and organizational planning.
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