For anyone who has worked with The Morse Group, you have experienced how we emphasize the use of visuals to help people see, grasp concepts, and gain alignment in real-time. The leaders we work with have found our process to be extremely beneficial in any situation where a team needs to spark new thinking or work through a challenge that requires the engagement of all involved. As a result of COVID, our virtual whiteboard meeting facilitation as well as digital tools have become part of our regular methods.
Beyond on our work with businesses, which range from startups to global companies, we are also actively involved in helping nonprofit organizations as part of our Work + Life + Community philosophy. We consistently reach out to our nonprofit network to listen, learn, and help bring new thinking to the table in an effort to turn their challenges into strategic opportunities.
HealthWorks! Kids’ Museum was one of those groups we connected with last year. We had engaged in exploratory conversations with Shannon Laine, Healthworks CEO, to start taking a strategic look at how to grow the organization, evaluate the current museum market overall, and address how technology could be used to expand learning and engagement beyond the footprint of the museum — and St. Louis.
Rolling out our Community Guide in early 2020, we switched our focus to our virtual education. The Morse Group’s innovative use of technology caught our eye and opened up conversations that expedited our opportunity to deliver virtual programming to the community. This allowed us to pivot our education model staying at the forefront of health education.
As part of our process, we ran the HealthWorks team through a virtual, and visual, strategy session to define their needs and to explore how a whiteboard system could solve their immediate challenges and to also open up thinking as to how virtual learning could help them to grow and lead in new ways beyond COVID. We worked with the team to gain alignment on the key goals of a system then tapped our network to secure a low cost and effective solution using repurposed SMART Boards that could be portable for movement through the museum and that would also interface with existing equipment they had on hand. We installed the system and took the team through a few training sessions to get them familiar with the process, role-played a working scenario, then did the hand-off the team to innovate, lead, and deliver their education in new ways.
As a small children’s health museum, we had to adapt our program delivery methods quickly during COVID. The whiteboard technology allowed us to easily modify our programs into virtual experiences while keeping it “FUN”. Not only have we been able to provide our audience an experience that is highly comparable to our in-person presentations, but it has actually made it easier for the educator to engage the students and transform any space in the museum into a learning area.
COVID created many challenges but many opportunities as well.
For HealthWorks, it helped them to expedite their thinking and put new systems in place much faster than they may have been able to do otherwise. Their willingness to try something new and adjust as needed is helping them to deliver new solutions and methods of teaching to benefit students and teachers alike.
This was an initiative that was not designed to simply be a Band-Aid to get us through the pandemic. This innovative solution is one that will open a new revenue stream and allow us to reach visitors anywhere in the world where they have an internet connection.
To learn more about HealthWorks! Kids’ Museum please click on their link or contact Dr. Kourtenay Green at info@hwstl.org
