How a Leading Museum Streamlined Insights to Stay Agile and Impactful

Use case: Enhancing insight efficiency for a leading regional museum

Background

A prominent museum plays a vital role in preserving and sharing the cultural and natural heritage of its region. With collections spanning history, art, science, and indigenous culture, the museum supports education, research, and public engagement year-round. The internal research team, though small, manages multiple data streams including: a monthly visitor profile survey, annual tracking studies, and ad hoc projects. With a lean team, most research is conducted in-house using face-to-face interviews and various data platforms.

“I think the thing I love the most about Harmoni is how quickly you can follow a hunch. It’s so easy to just run a quick x-break to see if there’s anything interesting - by whatever aspect you’ve suddenly thought ‘what if?’ about. This means deeper insights for the team, and it’s fast and so you can take a quick look to prove or disprove your hypothesis without seeing your morning, afternoon, or whole day go up in smoke while you set something up.” 

Challenge

Despite the team’s deep expertise, the variety of sources and tools, such as Excel, SPSS, and other platforms, created challenges in maintaining consistency and agility. The team was under growing pressure to deliver high-quality insights quickly while navigating:

• Disparate data sources housed across multiple systems
  
  
• Manual coding of open-ended responses, slowing down reporting cycles
  
  
• Limited internal capacity and time to focus on deeper insight generation
  
  
• A lack of integrated reporting tools that could handle both qualitative and quantitative data

They needed a better way to surface clear, meaningful stories from the data in a timely fashion.

Solution

After exploring several options, the museum’s insights team chose Harmoni to streamline its data analysis and reporting. The platform’s intuitive interface, flexible reporting options, and strong statistical tools allowed the team to visualize trends, identify patterns, and quickly respond to internal needs, without requiring additional headcount or technical support.

The platform allowed the team to:

• Centralize key tracking and survey data into one cohesive environment
  
  
• Use built-in significance testing and flexible cross-tab tools to explore and surface trends
  
  
• Reduce the reliance on external suppliers or additional software for day-to-day analysis

Importantly, the ability to build and update stories dynamically made Harmoni a useful tool for adapting to shifting needs without duplicating work.

Results

With Harmoni, the team reduced time spent on manual processes, improved clarity and consistency in reporting, and gained the ability to create custom analyses on the fly. Stakeholders especially value how clearly Harmoni presents significant results, enabling more confident, data-backed decisions, even during challenging economic times.

Harmoni delivered measurable benefits across the research function, including faster production of quarterly reports and improved clarity into the data. Users can easily see statistical differences, spot patterns, and apply filters without needing advanced technical skills

Overall, Harmoni has helped the museum maintain robust, responsive insights capabilities during a time of constrained budgets and shifting visitor expectations, while staying true to its mission of authentic, community-driven storytelling.

Want to learn how Harmoni can help your organization turn complexity into clarity? Contact us today or book a demo to get started.