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Jan 03 2022

RK&A is hiring! Project Coordinator

Image of a signboard that says "Join Our Team" in big block letters.

For more than 30 years, RK&A has served as a premier planning, evaluation, and research firm, supporting hundreds of museums and informal learning organizations. We are seeking a Project Coordinator to join our dynamic team. The Project Coordinator will provide administrative and operational support to our team of researchers and play a wide range of roles in both qualitative and quantitative research, focusing on logistics.

RK&A is remote-first with team members distributed along the East Coast (just north and south of Washington, DC). As a small, tight-knit team, we collaborate daily and require flexibility. The Project Coordinator is a remote position; however, we will prioritize applicants who reside in the mid-Atlantic region and especially within the DC-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) area specifically (where the majority of our projects take place) so they can assist with occasional in-person project tasks and participate in special in-person team meetings and retreats. The Project Coordinator is a salaried position of $44,000-$49,000 (commensurate with experience) plus a generous benefits package, including health insurance and 401K. RK&A will provide the necessary equipment to perform job duties (e.g., a computer), to be used for business purposes only.

Responsibilities will include:

Coordinate across team members and project schedules to keep workflow on track
Organizational set-up for new projects, including scheduling tasks and communication
Monitor project timelines (milestones and deliverables), expenses, and equipment
Take and maintain notes for meetings, workshops, focus groups, interviews, etc.
Recruit, schedule, coordinate, and distribute incentives for focus groups, interviews, and surveys
Program surveys, enter and organize data, and assist with data collection management
Prepare quantitative and qualitative data for analysis
Assist with hiring, scheduling, and monitoring subcontractors
Assist with project related paperwork like IRB applications and other permissions
Proofread reports and other deliverables for accuracy, quality, consistency, and formatting
Support in-house activities like archiving, marketing, and new business proposal materials
Support the overall operations of the business with various administrative tasks, as needed

The successful candidate will have:

Demonstrated experience coordinating and organizing large amounts of information across multiple complex projects (e.g., using spreadsheets and project management platforms)
Attention to detail and able to multi-task, manage, and prioritize
Ability to work independently and collaboratively with and across project teams
Excellent capabilities with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel
Experience working with data (qualitative and/or quantitative)
Ability to communicate effectively in both written and verbal formats
Interest in museums and/or informal education
A quiet and appropriate work environment during the workday

Other desirable qualifications/interests include:

Have an interest in applied research
Experience with Survey Monkey (or other similar online survey platform), Google Workspace, OneDrive, Canva, Asana, or SPSS (or other statistical software)
Fluency in a second language (Spanish or Arabic is a plus)
Website maintenance experience

Come as you are. RK&A is building towards a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable working environment. If you feel like you don’t have all the qualifications for this position and are willing to use your initiative to learn the rest, we’d still love for you to apply! Applications will be evaluated with an initial anonymized review (removing name, education affiliations, etc.) aimed at opening this opportunity to more candidates and mitigating unconscious biases in our hiring practices. Please read the application instructions below closely.

Application Instructions

All applicants should submit a brief PDF cover letter and a PDF resume included as an attachment (please include Project Coordinator in the file names). We will be using an initial anonymized review process for applications. As such, please follow these instructions for your cover letter and resume:

Do not include your name or pictures on your cover letter or resume
Indicate your degree level and content area, but please remove any undergraduate and graduate school names.
Generalize company or organization names in your work history (e.g., retail company, history museum, non-profit organization, restaurant) rather than naming specific companies or organizations. We are more interested in learning about your job skills and responsibilities than where you worked.
No references are required at this time.

Please submit your application via email to info@rka-learnwithus.com. We will be reviewing applications on a rolling basis, with plans to hire this position in February of 2022.

The post RK&A is hiring! Project Coordinator appeared first on RK&A.

Dec 31 2021

What you do is important.

freshspectrum cartoon by Chris Lysy

There is a lady sitting at a table drinking coffee. There is a logic model on the wall. The room is on fire. She is saying, "This is fine."

This cartoon is a knockoff of the amazing cartoon (turned meme) by KC Green

I had a really hard year back in 2017.

It was filled with the loss of close family which left a lingering mark on both my personal and professional lives. The couple years that followed saw my business falling apart and then a promising new job ending with a layoff.

And by the end of 2019, the mix of depression, uncertainty, anxiety, and entrepreneurship had darkened my outlook on life and spiked my cynicism.

I shared my troubles with a mentor, who sent me a framed inside joke. And stuck to the back of the frame, written in type, were these words…

“What you do is important.”

I know for many of you, 2021 was a shitty year.

Undoubtedly, some of you have lost close family or friends. Our daily lives have been flipped upside down with a massive jolt of change. We see constant reminders of unjust and unfair systems still thriving in our contemporary society.

The hope and optimism surrounding the vaccines has soured a bit with every new variant. And then there is the significantly large anti-vax movement.

The beginning of the pandemic was hard, but this sustained social anxiety and trauma wears on the soul.

freshspectrum cartoon by Chris Lysy.

Lady sitting at a desk. There is a hammer on the desk next to a shattered web camera.

She says, "unfortunately I can't turn on my video for today's Zoom. My webcam just stopped working."

It’s okay…

if you haven’t accomplished what you wanted to accomplish this past year.
if you have no clue what your plan should be for next year.
if you don’t know who you’re supposed to be.
if you feel stuck.
if you feel lost.

Tomorrow is a new day.

And if tomorrow doesn’t work out, well, there will be another.

freshspectrum cartoon by Chris Lysy

Lady sitting on couch staring ahead with an overwhelmed look.

I never cease to be amazed that there are people who read this blog. People who appreciate the cartoons that I draw. People who share what I write with their friends and colleagues.

And when I start to feel lost, I think about all of you.

Because you care.

It’s why you’re here. It’s why you can appreciate and share my cartoons.

Most of your audiences are not demanding cartoons from your presentations or better charts from your reports. They’re not looking to you to provide them with more engagement.

But it’s not enough for you to just present or report. To just show up at 9 and then leave at 5 (metaphorically speaking). You believe in your work, and you want your audience to be engaged.

You want your work to have an impact. To change the way your audience thinks or acts based on your collected evidence.

So you put in the work to try to make that happen.

freshspectrum cartoon by Chris Lysy

Guy on phone says...
"So there is no style guide, format requirements, content requests, or other additional guidance. Just keep it short?"

"One quick follow-up, does anyone actually give a shit?"

Evidence is insufficient.

It’s not enough to just know something to be true if you can’t convince anyone else to hear what you say or trust what you share. Especially if the evidence you are sharing is counter to your audience’s beliefs. Just think about all the ways you can finish this sentence.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary…

many republican politicians continue to claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
global warming is seen by large sectors of the population as not a man-made problem.
many Americans hold onto the fictional historical perspectives they learned in grade school.
some communities hit hard by COVID-19 continue to downplay the virus and refuse even the most basic precautions.

The back of a picture frame. In type is reads, "What you do is important."

While evidence is insufficient, it is indeed necessary.

We can’t change this world for the better without it. We need you to engage, collect, analyze, and support our communities, programs, and changemakers.

Our role as data people and evaluators can sometimes be thankless, lonely, and frustrating. Our best work is not always celebrated. Our audiences can be hard to engage.

But whatever happens in this new year. Don’t stop trying.

That’s the only way to fail completely.

I believe in you.

What you do is important.

Till next year,

Chris.

Dec 30 2021

Habit Design: A Starting Place

Among the greatest means to promoting sustained behaviour change is to create healthy (beneficial) habits. The science of behaviour change provides many recommendations for how to form, break, and maintain good habits.

While we often believe that beliefs change habits, we often find that behaviours themselves can just as profoundly affect our beliefs.

There are many ways to shape the design of habits with good research and we’re going to introduce you to a few of them.

Pay attention. The first step toward understanding habits is recognizing which ones we have — as individuals and organizations. Doing sufficient research to observe and record the degree to which we perform an activity repeatedly is essential. A habit is something that requires little or no conscious decision-making. It’s not that we don’t know it doesn’t exist, we just do it with the most minimum amount of ‘friction‘. Observation, recording, and reflection all contribute to this part of the process.
Model the benefits. All of our habits benefit us in some ways. The key is to determine what those benefits are and if those habits are harmful or detrimental to our goals. By knowing what we are doing we can begin to change what we do. By understanding the benefits of harmful or unproductive habits we can also start to determine how we might be able to replace them down the road with our designs.
Understand history. How salient is a habit? Once we know what we do, it’s important to see how strong habits are. For example, someone who started using cigarettes two weeks ago will have a different habit structure than someone who’s smoked for 25 years. Whether its consumer habits, health, productivity, or otherwise, the salience and strength of a habit is tied partly to a person’s history with that behaviour.
Model the context. It’s not enough to know what we do, it’s important to understand what context we do it. The environment is a powerful force in shaping what habits we engage in and to what degree. By understanding our context, including how and what triggers our habit, we can start to begin to re-design this context. This can be done by tracking what behaviour is performed, where, and what other variables were present at the time.
Identify leverage points. A leverage point is something that can be adjusted — amplified or reduced — that can yield large benefits indirectly within a system of activities. Most of what we seek to change is one behaviour among many that are, as we’ve seen, often connected to one another. For example, to use the cigarette example, many smokers cite drinking alcohol as a co-habit (the two are done together). In this case, reducing or changing the way one behaviour is done can also affect the other. This is called habit stacking. It’s having one behaviour affect another .

By engaging in systematic inquiry — observation, interviews, surveys, or reflective practice — we can start to illuminate some of these powerful hidden forces that shape and direct our choices and behaviour.

Try these methods out. The application does not need to be complicated, just systematic.

Need help or want more detailed design research to help your organization change and design for something different? We can help you – contact us.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

The post Habit Design: A Starting Place appeared first on Cense Ltd. .

Dec 29 2021

How Can We measure 2021?

How can we measure 2021?

Over the past few months, we’ve been playing a lot of music for our baby girl, to keep her entertained (mostly because Mommy and Daddy sing and dance around the house like fools) and to help lull her to sleep.

We may not be helping her get along with her future peers, but for now, she’s becoming an aficionado of Queen, The Beatles, and Broadway classics.

So, in the spirit of the musical RENT, let’s amuse ourselves with a game of “how do we measure a year?” – 2021 edition.

I don’t think that 2021 was the year that any of us were expecting.

Right now, it feels like we are right back where we started in early 2020, with school being disrupted, cases surging, and holiday plans being canceled.

For me, while the world feels very much the same, most everything in my daily life has changed!

If I’m going to be super nerdy (which should be expected of me at this point), we can take a lesson from “Seasons of Love” and see that we can both quantify and qualify our measurements.

So what metrics could I use to describe my year?

How many ounces our little one takes at each feeding and over the course of a day
How many hours of sleep we get (or don’t get!) each night
How many times a day our dog licks the baby or her stuff (sigh)
How many hours (no wait, minutes) of work I get done before needing to put her pacifier back in her mouth

These are all VERY REAL metrics for me right now!

But of course, they don’t capture the full picture of my year or my experience as a new working mom.

It’s also important to consider how joyful we feel when our daughter breaks into a grin when she sees us, or the burning rage that comes with being woken from a much-needed nap (me, of course – not the baby), or the fear I have on a daily basis of exposing my child to one of the many diseases running rampant right now.

All of these things are both valid and critical to understanding my experience and to uncovering unmet needs.

When we think of how to tell the story of our family engagement work during yet another challenging year, we need to consider how to quantify and qualify our efforts and impacts.

Of course, we’ll want to know who we reached and track our efforts to do so.

But it’s also important to know how those people felt after that outreach and the ways in which their lives were (hopefully) made a bit easier as a result.

Sometimes, we also need to know how we can do better and what else our students and families need.

It just takes a creative approach to data collection to capture the full story.

As you reflect on how 2021 went for you, both personally and professionally, how would you measure your year?

Leave a comment below and let me know what measures feel authentic to your year!

Dec 27 2021

Comment on Earth Day at 51: Why Museums Must Embrace the Anthropocene by Relevance Revisited: A Postscript for the Museum Field » RK&A

[…] Earth Day at 51: Why Museums Must Embrace the Anthropocene for drawing our attention to the world’s new geologic context of the Anthropocene and pleading for museums to present a unified [rather than the all-to-common divided] portrait of nature and culture, “with equal respect for both.” […]