Museum Audience Insight

A Parent's Dilemma

Or:  How to Have an Adult Museum Experience … Without It Costing Too Much, Boring Your Kids, and Annoying Other Visitors

This summer, my husband and I bought a house, renovated it while we were living somewhere else temporarily, and then moved in.  During those long, expensive, and admittedly stressful weeks packing and unpacking, painting until 10 p.m., and dealing with construction problems we hadn’t anticipated, we relied heavily on family and friends to baby-sit our toddler.  We ended up burning through a lot of babysitting goodwill in the process.  So this weekend, when we finally had time to see a museum exhibition that I had been dying to get to, we ended up toting our son with us.

 

We knew that an art exhibition was too much to ask of a sixteen-month-old, so our plan was to take turns seeing the show, with one parent at a time playing with our kid on the lawn outside the museum building.  Here’s the problem:  it rained buckets that day, and the museum didn’t have a child-friendly indoor space.  Our options were:  (1) to skip the outing altogether, with the strong possibility that we would miss seeing the exhibition before it closed, (2) have one parent stay home with our son, or (3) put him in a backpack or stroller and go through on fast-forward so we didn’t bore him to death and drive all of the other visitors crazy, all the while enduring dirty looks from patrons who felt that the exhibition was no place for small children.  We chose the latter, lived with the dirty looks, and left with regret that we hadn’t had a more relaxed and focused experience.

 

Of course, if we had the money, we would have avoided this problem by hiring a babysitter to watch our son for the afternoon.  But after paying for the gas to drive a half-hour to get to the museum, paying general admission, and paying an admission surcharge for the exhibition itself, we just couldn’t justify the extra expense.  The sitters in our area charge $15 an hour!!

 

All of this got me thinking.  We can’t be the only ones with this dilemma.  Does being a parent of a small child mean that adult museum programs are pretty much impossible to attend?  Last year our children’s museum research showed us that parents often do avoid art museums, likely due to this dilemma.  So how many other parents miss out on exhibits and programs because of a lack of child care?  How many visitors are museums losing in the process?  What could do museums do improve this situation?  Are there ways to make both parents and kids happy, in the same building, at the same time?

 

My local supermarket has a supervised, secure children’s area where kids can play while their parents shop during certain publicized hours.  How about implementing something similar at a museum, perhaps on weekends when more moms and dads are able to take advantage of it, or during a special program or opening event?  Admittedly, this requires not only a dedicated employee to staff the area but also the space and some children’s toys or activities to keep the kids busy--or even better, learning while doing.  And sorry, but a fee for such a service probably isn’t going to work.  We parents are already feeling pinched enough by the time we plunk down the money to get in the front door.

 

Another, less costly, option would be simply to have a kid-friendly play space without the dedicated staff.  My husband and I would be very happy to have a dedicated area where we could take turns staying and playing with our son. 

 

One final point:  if the museums in our area already have such areas available, we don’t know about it.  Could this be a selling point for your museum?

- Erica

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work Nights, School Nights, Museum Nights

Remember school nights when you were a child?  The next morning you had to get up and go to school, which meant a bath, truncated TV time, and early to bed.  As a young adult, you have/had work nights – nights when it is probably a bad idea to stay at happy hour beyond a happy time because the next morning you have to get up and go to work.  And, if you are a parent, you may have had many sleepless nights – no explanation necessary.

The other night, my son told me it was Museum Night – because the next morning he would get up and go to the Boston Children’s Museum!  This was a day that he had been counting down to for at least a week, asking each evening at bedtime if it was Museum Night yet.  Quite frankly, even with a bath and early to bed, he got very little sleep.  He loves museums, and he especially loves the Boston Children’s Museum.  So now, we have an addition to the family lexicon - the eagerly anticipated Museum Night.

I love that my kid gets excited about visiting museums.  And I wish all kids had the same excitement about Museum Night as Dalton has.

The seeds of my young Museum Advocate have been sown early.  But how will museums work together to ensure that more youngsters catch the museum bug, and have their own Museum Nights?  What is our plan to create more Museum Advocates?  We are talking about that quite a bit at Reach Advisors, so look for more posts in the next few months about Museum Advocates and young museum experiences.

- Sally

Photo:  Dalton Johnston, son of Senior Consultant Sally Johnstone, in the climbing sculpture at BCM with Senior Consultant Susie Wilkening (who did, indeed, climb up to the top with Dalton!).

Brand Recovery in the Social Networking Era

I just wanted to be a lurker.  That’s all.

 

Maybe a year ago I joined Facebook.  You have to join to see what is going on in there, so I signed up.  I asked no one to be my friend.  I was just lurking. 

 

And then one of my husband’s friends, Aidan, found me.  I know he was actually looking for Jeremy, but my husband is admittedly even less technologically hip than me, and is not on Facebook at all.

 

So Aidan became my first friend. 

 

A couple of months later, leading a Generation Y session at a museum conference, I confessed I had only one friend on Facebook.  Gen Y panelist Amanda Rosner felt sorry for me and said she would friend me.  And so she did.

 

Slowly, a few others found me, and I had several Facebook friends, mostly from within the museum field.  I was ok with that.  I took ten minutes and threw something on my profile.  I posted a picture of the incomparable Shadow instead of a picture of myself. 

 

It all ended about a week ago.  Kevin found me.  I grew up with Kevin.  I think we went to Kiddie Kollege together when we were about four.  And we graduated from the same, small, rural, Georgia high school. 

 

Kevin has always been an extremely nice, friendly guy.  I had a crush on him all through fifth grade.  But I really had lost touch with everyone from high school. Now we are friends on Facebook, and the floodgates have opened.  He spread the word to other high school classmates that I had been “found,” and now, suddenly I am “friends” with a slew of people I have not seen since I was seventeen.  They were all perfectly nice people in high school, and I am sure they are all perfectly nice people today, so I have no reason to rudely turn down their friend requests. 

 

The other night, however, a sense of panic set in.  Were my high school “friends,” who are, in reality, scarcely even acquaintances now, going to outnumber all my friends from my current life, both in and out of the museum field?  Being, well, somewhat technically challenged, I scoured the friends of my museum friends to find people I know and like (I don’t really know how else to find people on the darn thing), and I sent out a flurry of friend requests (ok . . . four), feeling I needed to rebalance (thank you to those who accepted my invitation!).

 

This whole exercise, and my reaction to it, has made me think about my personal brand, and how branding is changing in this new, social-networking realm.  I was pretty happy with my brand on Facebook.  It was low-key, and I only had a few friends, but they were people I know and enjoy, and I was happy that, in a way, they represented me.  When I felt that my personal “brand,” however, was becoming skewed by an influx of new friends who are perhaps not so representative of me today, I went into brand-recovery mode. 

 

This has made me think about branding, and ultimately how much control we have over our brands.  We set up Facebook pages and encourage people to become fans of our museums, but we really have no control over who chooses to become fans.  Some may have uploaded pictures that are inappropriate, and now they appear on our pages because they are fans.  Does that make them “undesirable” fans?  Do our fans and, by extension, do our visitors create the identities of our museums?  Do my Facebook friends define who I am?

 

We live in a world where identity morphs and changes quickly, and often without warning.  We can manage it somewhat, and try to rebalance it (as I attempted to do the other night), but we now, more than ever, are putting the power of our brands in the hands of our visitors and members.  They go to sites like Facebook and fan us, and thereby create a closer tie to our museums.  Or they go to Yelp! and complain about us, though there again we can take steps to address those concerns, as our guest blogger Jennifer Caleshu shared a few weeks ago. 

 

So yes, our visitors define who we are, and sometimes they do a better job of it than we do.  But this is an opportunity for museums.  Every fan represents an emotional connection, and those emotional connections go a long way towards sustaining and growing our museums. 

 

It is a little bit scary to allow visitors to define our brands for us.  Yet the power of word-of-mouth has meant they always have, and now our visitors have venues to spread the word much more efficiently and easily, and this is also incredibly exciting.  More than ever, our social networking strategy has to fold into our web strategy, our traditional marketing strategy, and our public relations strategy.  It is a lot to manage, but the payback ultimately leads to more engaged visitors and members.  And don’t we all want that?

 

I have made peace with my friends list on Facebook.  They do represent me . . . who I have been in the past and who I am now.  If only I could figure out how to find people on the darn thing, and maybe I should fan some more museums I like . . . .

 

Do you have any stories about how social networking has helped your museum?  Or trying to find your way through the multitude of sites trying to connect people?  To share or ask questions, simply click on “comments” below.  (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.)

- Susie

Creative Consumers, Extremely Creative Consumers, and Museums

We are delighted to welcome the inaugural article of Sally Johnstone, Senior Consultant at Reach Advisors.  Sally has extensive experience in marketing strategy and works with a variety of economic development, tourism, and community building clients at Reach Advisors.  She is also an amateur musician and enjoys taking her son, Dalton, to children's museums.  You can look forward to more posts by Sally on creativity, the arts, and Generation Y, as well as other topics, in the future.

Museums are wonderful places that share our cultural, and creative, histories.  They are also places of creative inspiration.  And so when we began the analysis of our Generation Y lifestyle research results this summer, we were intrigued to discover a very interesting group of young women (and a few men) setting new standards for creative expression.  Armed with a bedazzler, a fistful of multicolored Sharpies, and tech savvy that would put a NASA engineer to shame, this imaginative group represents 25% of Generation Y (members of the generation born after 1980).  Labeled Creative Consumers, this segment stands in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the spectrum - a segment almost as large that we've dubbed the Plain and Practical, who aren't even likely to draw a smiley face on a notebook.  As we will see, our Creative Consumers are tremendously important to museums.

The first thing we noticed was that Generation Y's definition of creativity has definitely expanded.  Creativity includes traditional activities, such as knitting, but it also includes spending hours to make a MySpace page have a very specific look. 
 
First, the attributes of the Creative Consumers:

Creative Consumers are into customization.  All of them have hand-crafted items themselves, or customized items in ways that go way beyond off-the-shelf options (by off-the-shelf, we mean a commercially available iPod case, computer wallpaper that came with the operating system, a standard MySpace template, etc.).

• Creative Consumers leave their own trademark on their belongings.  They adopt a signature icon such as Betty Boop, or a color that they consider their own, such as purple, that they use to reflect their own personal style.  They are likely to integrate photos of family, pets and friendsor with their own name into their creative works all in an effort to make everything a reflection of their unique personality
• Over 90% of Creative Consumers think that the things they own should reflect their personality, in stark contrast to just 55% of the Plain and Practical who feel likewise.  
• The Creative Consumers are three times more likely than the Plain and Practicals to want their 'stuff' to look different from everyone else's.
• The Creative Consumers are twice as likely to feel that their home should be an expression of who they are.

Creative Consumers are active and extroverted and eager to experience life:

• In their hang-outs, Creative Consumers are more likely to want to pick their own music, be outdoors, and do work or homework in the hang-out.  They are most definitely more social.
• They are twice as likely as the topline to be looking for public space to meet up with those sharing their interests and hobbies.
• Three-quarters meet up with friends somewhere other than home but indoors, compared to two-thirds of the topline, and only half of the Plain and Practical.
• Creative Consumers are nearly twice as likely to be into fitness, team sports and individual sports as the Plain and Practical.
• They are nearly three times as likely to do some form of art or craft; twice as likely to sing or play an instrument; three times as likely to blog as the Plain and Practical.
• If they are parents, their kids are twice as likely to do crafts as the Plain and Practical
• They are more likely than any other segment to enjoy visiting museums in their leisure time:  30% of the Creative Consumers do so, compared to 19% of the Plain and Practical.

Creative Consumers are more connected and active online: 

• Two-thirds of Creative Consumers are socializing while online (IM'ing, updating social networking profiles, checking on friends, emailing) compared to just half of the topline and only a third of the Plain and Practical.
• They are twice as likely as the Plain and Practical to be downloading music, etc.
• They are twice as likely to be visiting news sites online as the Plain and Practical.

 
Creative Consumers like to shop, yet are also greener:

• They are twice as likely to go shopping or travel as the Plain and Practical.
• So it is not surprising that they are twice as likely to be shopping online.
• They are twice as likely to purchase organic or local food; twice as likely to purchase things that help the environment.

There isn't much of a difference when comparing the Creative Consumers to the topline for most demographic measures (except gender, which skews female, like many things Gen Y).  They do not differ greatly from other Gen Ys in:

• Household income
• Education
• Age (within the parameters of Generation Y)
• Parents' education
• Marital/relationship status

For all that Creative Consumers are attractive and engaging young women, there's an even more interesting subset that we decided to call (in a particularly uninspired moment) the Extremely Creative Consumers.  For Extremely Creative Consumers, all of the above observations apply, albeit they feel even more strongly; for example, 97% of the Extremely Creative Consumers think that the things they own should reflect their personality, compared to 90% of the Creative Consumers.

The Extremely Creative Consumers (representing about 15% of the Generation Y women in our study) go even further to be especially artistic, unique, and original in everything they do. They draw, decoupage, collage, tear clothing apart and re-make it to express their personal style, sculpt, write poetry, blogs, fiction, create music, design websites - their activities run the gamut of creative expression accessible today.
 
Even an individual Extremely Creative Consumer's interests are truly wide-ranged, from performing arts to crafts like knitting and sewing.  Check out the list of hobbies enjoyed by this young woman from Hawaii (full disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of the International Society of Bassists).
 
Some Extremely Creative Consumers have figured out a way to profit from their creativity. Ashley Qualls, a teenager who parlayed a gift for creating custom graphics for MySpace pages into a million dollar business, was recently profiled in this case study from Fast Company magazine.

Other extremely creative consumers are not just creating their own works - they're creating documentaries and books about what others are making.  A September 3, 2008 article in the NY Times discusses Faythe Levine's upcoming feature-length documentary "Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft and Design" and book.  (An eight-minute teaser from the documentary is available online at her website.)
 
Where is this shift coming from?  Some of it may be the democratization of expression afforded by the Internet.  Some of it is today's relative ease and cheapness with which anyone can acquire the materials needed for art and craft.  And, some of it may be a new Renaissance of creativity sparked in this generation by a multitude of technical, social, and cultural factors.
 
In the end, we have to come back to that museum number: 30% of the Creative Consumers enjoy visiting museums in their leisure time.   These bright young adults are Museum Advocates and the parents-to-be of the next generation of Museum Advocates. What can museums do to help them expand their creative horizons and foster their love of the institutions?  Some ideas:

• Provide an opportunity to gather with like-minded creative people: Creative Consumers like to gather together to practice their craft, share ideas, and socialize with others who enjoy their art. Etsy, an online marketplace for crafters, hosts a weekly Craft Night at their EtsyLabs headquarters.  Young crafters flock to Brooklyn to meet each other, learn from one another, and have a great time.  Museums could do likewise.
• Provide training: Many of the Creative Consumers are at an apprentice phase in their development.  Where else but a museum would the masters be found?  Are there programs and classes that you could offer in both historic and new techniques that would attract these young creatives?
• Provide gallery space:  Recognize their creativity by allowing them to share their work with others in your museum. 

Are you already working to engage this group of creative group of young women?  We would love to hear what you are doing!  Or if this article sparks new ideas for programming, share them as well!   Simply click on “comments” below.  (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.)

 

- Sally