A recent questions was posed to me about how does a group measure if its being successful in railroad preservation arena?

Maybe a few of you would like to share how does your group measure if its a successful group or not?

Do you measure success by how many cabooses you have restored or do you measure by how many artifacts you have on display in your museum or maybe it's how many people belong to your organization?

Thanks!!
Steven

The budget determines if we are financially successful and our strategic plan provides guidelines for measuring success of the organization's efforts to uphold our mission statement. We evaluate feedback from our visitors to measure if our programs are successful in meeting the goals and objectives for daily operations, education programs and special events.

Wesley

I think Wes has got the point across about success being what you define it to be in your mission statement. How to measure achievement is another thing.

Peter Drucker contaminated management training with the idea that you can only manage what you can measure, and too many people bought into it because it is easy to make decisions based on that criteria. Managing what can't be measured is what we need to do if visitor satisfaction is a criteria. How many units of satisfaction do we produce?

Counting dollars and butts in seats is easy, and useful things can be learned by doing so, but not everything important. If many people show up and pay and leave disgusted, is that success? If very few people show up, we let them in for free and they become happy and enthusiastic supporters, is that success?

I'm sort of relieved that you are thinking about success and unhappy that your thought process is related to deciding if there's a size and shape of a box that can define and hold it.

dave

If you are starting with a rail siding of cabooses and a room full of dusty artifacts, it would be a good idea to asses what you have, paint the cabooses and dust off the artifacts, but that's not how you become 'successful.'

Wes gives a good 2 sentence description of what a mature organization does to measure success, but Steven, if you are 'just getting started' Wes' response might seem a bit daunting. But that's where you need to be eventually:
have a solid, attainable mission statement
have a strategic plan that doesn't sit on the shelf: it should be a dog-eared, coffee-stained document that's used as the key tool for moving the museum forward, including how to advance the organization's goals and how to assess success.

There are whole books on these subjects. And past ARM (now merging with TRAIN) conferences have had good seminars about this. Looks like this Fall's conference in Chattanooga will have more valuable related talks.

How did we ever get anything done is railway preservation without "mission statements"? Most of the older museums began before such management terms became part of the national vocabulary. Of course many of the older museums have (or had) collections with relics that really didn't belong there, but that some members thought would be "nice to have". In recent years we've seen various cars and locomotives dealt off to other groups where they are the "star of the show" rather than an "orphan stepchild", so one could say that a measure of success is the willingness to "deaccession" a unit to a better home, rather than hanging onto to it while it slowly decays. We could also measure success by the percentage of the collection that's under cover rather than exposed to the elements.

We were essentially social clubs in an environment of plentiful resources and recpetive railroad managements, with far less litigation and a population that remembered steam and liked history. We now have worse stuff and mostly junk that costs a fortune to move, few railroad managers who came out of railroading, those that did know nothing about 6ET, friction bearings, and are overseen by teams of paranoid bureaucrats.

Sophisticated problems require sophisticated management, so we have to be more professional to prosper and produce good programming. The social club model is now only good for very small, informal, and low funded operations with a goal of making its members happy and not worrying about anything else, at least until enough of the members die off and then there's no future.

Mission statements are more than acquisitions lists.

dave

Anyone on the board of or involved with planning for a railway preservation group should read Recommended Practices for Railway Museums from the ARM. It covers the basic needs for governance, policies, collection management, staffing, funding, etc.

On the subject of mission statements, I just did a quick search of the web sites of about a dozen rail related museums, some big, some small, and only about a third of them actually provide their mission statement. I'd have thought the ratio would be much higher. Why be shy about it?

I would have to say that "getting things done" is a good measure of success. As an NRHS Chapter, we share the somewhat general mission statement of NRHS National. We are restoring a station (and in the process learning all about the process of public funding), running train rides, sending equipment out for public display, have a growing membership, have a strong regional focus on our collection, and are actually gaining ground on the rust in our equipment collection. We are well aware of the long term needs for proper (indoor) shop facilities, property ownership, and covered storage, and are working towards those goals. Also, we are financially solvent and well managed fiscally. By those standards, reasonably successful.

Wes,

The question might seem I'm looking for a box to place everything in but looking to see what is out there an how people consider being successful in their organization.

Our group is starting to grow and we are running projects now so I wanted to ask people who might be doing well how to avoid the pitfalls that we seem to get into in our little steam industry.

So it seems to me based on a few answers below that our 2012 goal of over hauling our Mission statement and a 5 year long range plan is right on track to make the group grow for the future.

Always open to other suggestions as I don't know everything about every subject.

Thanks!!

Steven H.

When you are working it through, please don't just look at it from the perspective of the group - bit look at it from the outside, as a visitor or prospective supporter would, and tailor your entire brand, identity and programming to appeal to that market. No point doing only what you want to do if it has no chance of gaining broad based support. Raillfans are not numerous enough or supportive enough to be that broad a base. Good luck.

dave

Measuring “success” can be like grading a student in a primary school. A group may do well at painting or restoring items but it may do lousy at communicating with out of town members or stating financial needs due to non existent or limited reporting of financial needs. May of the groups struggle from the simple inability to communicate weather due to basic inability or because someone is promoting a personal bias excuse as to their failure thus far in making accomplishments.

Another area of confusion is record keeping of the organizations history and its donors. Often people remember who they donated to organization X but how many us remember who donated to us? In one case for me I volunteered time to the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Library Special Collections on inventorying both the Hagerty Collection and the SP collection. When I went to work for Grand Canyon Railway in June of 1996 my ability to donate ended. So you can imagine my surprise 12 years latter when Claudia Rivers Department head of the UTEP Library Special Collections Department asked me if how they spelled my name on the new finding guide was ok?

http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/finding_aid/1/

I was both surprised and humbled by their remembering my small contribution particularly given the other donations that they have benefited from. It is nice to see that after all of those years my donation is still remembered and appreciated. Equally important is the fact that the effort to continue the work did not end with my departure. And today when I can I still try to give them something.

Other groups that I know of have lost there focus or even their identity because the member’s interest have changed. This can cause some real issues latter if property is involved.

In measuring a group’s success you have to consider the entire picture. After all a group may do very well at restoring freight cars and historic RR buildings but then do very poorly at managing and operating a property because they do not know all of the details of operating a Historic Railroad. If someone is going to measure their success they have to be willing to admit failure in part or all of their endeavors.

Just food for thought.

Robby Peartree

Here is an example of measuring success.

The Washington Post and the Center for Non Profit Excellence Sponsor an annual award for local non-profit organizations. The list of questions is posted for your consideration. The application also asks "Describe any particularly innovative practices in this area from which others might learn?" for each of the six questions. The focus of the questions is on management and governance.

1. What types of planning does your organization undertake? Who is
involved and what are the processes? How do you include diverse
perspectives and stakeholders in the process? What have been the results
of the organization’s planning efforts?

2. a.) What systems or practices has your organization put in place to
ensure effective financial stewardship? Please address practices in the
areas of internal controls, budgeting, financial planning and reporting.
b.) If you had a deficit during the most recent year, please explain why.

3. How does your organization approach fundraising/resource development? Address your fundraising strategy as well as the roles of
your board, staff and others in resource development activities.

4. How does your organization benefit from and incorporate the
activities and contributions of diverse populations and perspectives in
the individuals you engage as staff, board and volunteers?

5. What does your board of directors do to contribute to the
management of your organization?
b.) How do you ensure diverse perspectives and representation in the
governance of your organization?

6. a.) Provide an example of a mistake or a poor decision your
organization has made in the past. What did you learn from this
experience and what management practices/lessons learned have you put in
place as a result? What advice would you give other nonprofits faced with
a similar situation?
b.) Please highlight up to three additional management practices or
innovations that serve as specific examples of excellence in nonprofit
management in your organization with demonstrated results over the past
three years. How are these practices supported and sustained in your
organization? What can others learn from these practices?

The main purpose of the award is to recognize excellence and innovative practices. Thinking all of the work we did in planning and executing our move to new facilities deserved recognition, I submitted an application for our Museum. Much to my disappointment, we did not win the award. From this effort I discovered that we were in fact quite ordinary and fairly healthy.

Wesley