About ACM

Started in 1962, the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) is the world’s foremost professional member service organization for the children’s museum field. With more than 460 members in 50 states and 16 countries, ACM leverages the collective knowledge of children’s museums through convening, sharing, and dissemination.

In 2016, ACM established a partnership with Knology, a nonprofit organization dedicated to pursuing practical social science for a better world. Through this partnership, ACM and Knology revolutionized ACM’s data collection to create a longitudinal dataset allowing for multi-year analysis to identify trends.

Today, this single dataset continues to identify long-term trends and draw attention to emerging issues and opportunities for elevating the children’s museums field. These findings are published under the ACM Trend Reports name and allow the field to use comparative data to advance museums’ financial stability, professional accountability, and service to their communities.

The ACM Trends Data Hub was developed from the wealth of knowledge that emerged from the data analysis. The Data Hub allows museums to access their own data, compare their museum to field-wide averages, and benchmark their museum to other museums of similar scale or location throughout the U.S. The data is pulled from U.S. Internal Revenue Form 990 (Form 990) and self-reported data from museums. The data can be viewed through operational groups related to attendance, income, expenses, and staff. Ratios are used in each group to normalize (or make similar) the data for each museum to support future forecasting or compare children’s museums of the same scale and service.

In 2019, the ACM Trends Program launched a redesigned membership survey, streamlining data collection by eliminating questions already reported by museums to the Form 990 and ensuring respondents only see questions relevant to their operational scale. The redesign also broke down the member survey into smaller surveys focused on different aspects of museum work. The frequency of survey distribution was also adjusted, with most surveys moving to a 2–5-year cycle since many of the responses do not vary substantially year over year. While survey distribution was paused due to the pandemic, further revisions reflecting the ongoing impact of the pandemic on children’s museums’ operations have been incorporated. These new surveys form the backbone of the ACM Trends Report series and provide essential benchmarking data to the ACM Trends Data Hub. The continuation of the ACM Trends Program is made possible through funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant MG-80-19-0042-19).

This DataHub was built collaboratively by ACM, and Knology, a New York based social science research think tank.