LOODA - Looking for datas

Looda – Looking for Datas is a European project born from the collaboration between two children's museums, MUBA and Sladovna in Pisek (Czech Republic), Hands-On! International, the European network of children's museums, and BAM! Cultural Strategies.
The project aims to increase the knowledge and skills of children's museum operators, enabling them to collect data and measure the social impact on their local areas and communities.

The impetus for the project came from multiple directions. On the one hand, there is the need to assess and measure the social impact that children’s museums generate within the communities in which they operate. The pandemic clearly highlighted the role of museums in general, and children’s museums in particular, as key actors in social welfare; the challenge now lies in transforming existing inclusive practices into tangible and systematic actions whose impact can be effectively measured.

On the other hand, there is a need to broaden the skills of children’s museum professionals and deepen their understanding of the social contexts in which they work. Only in this way can they be fully equipped to recognise, articulate, and add value to the impact of their activities.

The project aims to provide museums with a toolkit to support the collection and organization of data necessary for social impact analysis, laying the foundations for evaluation and facilitating comparison between data collected by organizations at the European level.
To achieve this goal, the partnership is designing and testing an innovative training course during the project, which is common to all partners and adaptable at European level. The course is intended for staff at children's museums, with the aim of training them in the use of the toolkit developed by the partners.

Following the training course, Muba and Sladovna, supported by BAM!, will develop a system of indicators and measurement tools designed specifically for their targets: this valuable “toolbox,” available to operators, will allow museums to periodically collect data and aggregate it into a database that is useful, on the one hand, to individual institutions and, on the other, for comparing data acquired at the national and international levels.