Like many museums, Sacred Heart University’s Discovery Science Center and Planetarium in Bridgeport, Connecticut was closed for 18 months during the pandemic. But when they reopened their doors, high demand for in-person visits and school field trips meant they rapidly grew from 6 to 25 staff members, which brought new challenges.

“We really struggled with internal communications and managing our data processes,” recalls Erika Eng, Discovery’s executive director. The key challenge was to connect the right people with the right information to do their job: engaging audiences of all ages with hands-on science learning.

Discovery staff organized themselves into a team and reached out to CTData for training and coaching. Working together, they looked more closely at their existing information workflows and strategized how to better align their data goals and resources. “Coaching the Discovery Science Center was amazing,” reflects Fionnuala Darby-Hudgens, Director of Data Strategic Planning at CTData, “because their team invested time to improve their processes and to better understand their work.”

Over two years, they strengthened the “data culture” of their organization and implemented change in three areas: improving shared data to connect all staff, revising online forms to streamline event reservations and memberships, and visualizing key indicators to show their impact for stakeholders.

The Discovery Science Center leadership quickly realized that rapidly growing their staff created an information problem that needed a solution. Every organization orients new team members with directories, schedules, and essential details, which continually need updating. “One absolutely transformational suggestion by our CTData coach was to create a Sharepoint site to overcome those information challenges,” says Sarah Tropp-Pacelli, Director of Development and Data Management at Discovery.

The concept is an internal website that displays links to shared documents, as shown in Figure 1. Since Discovery already used Microsoft products, their Sharepoint platform was a good choice to organize nested folders of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, along with calendar widgets and other productivity tools.

“Everything that new people need to learn when coming on board is all in one place now,” explains executive director Erika Eng “which means fewer phone calls and emails to me.” Also, Discovery is rolling out another Sharepoint dashboard specifically for its board members, with agendas, bylaws, and data that are most meaningful for them.

Figure 1: Two sample screenshots from the Discovery internal Sharepoint platform to improve staff access to shared data such as calendars, directories, and details about exhibits and groups of visitors.

The second challenge for Discovery staff was to rethink their information workflows for their event reservations, ranging from small parties to larger school groups.

“When we first started working with CTData,” recalls Sarah Troop-Pacelli, “our coach pointed out that we had 29 steps to handle a single reservation.” Everyone worked together to streamline these cumbersome processes.

One solution was to build better online reservation forms. Parents booking a simple birthday party answer one set of questions, while educators scheduling a more complex school field trip answer a different set of questions. CTData coached the team on integrating some of the back-end data tools that Discovery was already paying for (such as their Little Green Light customer relations management database and their Wix website), but not fully utilizing.

To be clear, online forms do not resolve everything. Discovery’s people-oriented values meant that they still needed to follow up by phone or email to customize reservation details, especially for large school groups. But better online workflows mean less of the back-and-forth messaging that previously consumed too much time, freeing up staff to focus on their primary mission.

The third challenge for the Discovery Science Center was to increase staff capacity to become a more “data-empowered” museum. Partnering with CTData for customized training and coaching was a key ingredient.

“I got so much from attending one CTData training session as an individual,” explained Sarah Tropp-Pacelli, “that we asked them to bring another training to Discovery to help more of us.”

Staff became more comfortable with exploring the organization’s own data and learned skills to answer the questions that really mattered to them. For example, Discovery added key data indicators and a statewide map of visitors by town to their 2024 Annual Report, as shown in Figure 2.

Being able to visualize their geographic reach helped them understand their growing audience and share that story with others. “Our map shows that our reach is really starting to spread out,” observes Tropp-Pacelli, who noted a growth in visitors from southern Fairfield County and north into the Hartford region. “Discovery has a more recognizable name now,” she concluded, “and people know what we’re offering is different.” Data visualization makes it easier to tell their story and show their impact.

Looking back on the partnership, Sarah Tropp-Pacelli summarizes how CTData helped her organization by carving out time and offering support to focus on three key steps:

What are your big questions?
What are your stumbling blocks to answering those questions?
How you build a process that will actually get you the answers to those questions?

The Data Strategic Planning program offers cohort-based workshops and customized coaching sessions to help pull nonprofit together, focus on common problems, and guide them on integrating their existing data and low-cost tools. The goal is to strengthen your organization’s data culture, as well as the broader data ecosystem of nonprofit organizations and public agencies across Connecticut.

Ask your nonprofit leaders and funders if CTData training and coaching is right for you.
Learn more at CTData.org/datastrategicplanning.

Team Effort: Discovery Science Center Builds Its Data Culture with CTData