Rethinking project selection at the Monterey Bay Aquarium

In 1995, the Monterey Bay Aquarium started an experimental business unit ca lled Electronic Outreach. Electronic Outreach's mission was to employ emerg ing technologies to deliver the aquarium's messages of ocean stewardship to diverse and scattered audiences. Faced with many projects from which to ch oose, the Electronic Outreach team wanted to determine which projects were most likely to succeed before they actually had to dedicate resources to de velopment. We constructed two models to help them accomplish this: a multia ttribute-value model to quantify a project's alignment with the aquarium's mission and a discounted-cash-flow model to quantify a project's viability as a business venture. We then combined the outputs of these two models int o a two-dimensional framework to allow the Electronic Outreach team members to focus on monetary-nonmonetary trade-offs when evaluating potential proj ects.