Building Community Relationships: The Challenge

Over the past few years, museum professionals have been placing increasing weight on building relationships with local communities.  Results from recent visitor surveys conducted by Reach Advisors, however, point to a major disconnect between field-wide goals for museum-community relationships and the reality of visitor perceptions of those relationships.  As we shared in a recent post, only 11 to 21% of Core Visitors to science museums, outdoor history museums, children’s museums, and Connecticut cultural organizations feel that the museum whose survey they responded to “brings the community together.”

 

This is obviously troubling information, and it deserves greater exploration.  The results of the Connecticut Cultural Consumers survey (funded by the Connecticut Humanities Council), corroborated with findings from our other studies, can tell us a lot about who feels that their museums bring their community together, who doesn’t, and why their perceptions matter. 

 

For starters, here are the bottom-line numbers.  When asked, “Is there anything that you think this organization does particularly well?” 21% of Connecticut survey respondents selected “They bring the community together.” 

 

The first question we asked ourselves in response to this data was:  do more loyal visitors feel more positively about their museum’s relationship with their local community?  Here we see mixed results.  Museum Advocates, those devotees who enjoy visiting museums in their leisure time, were slightly more likely to say that the museum whose survey they responded to brings the community together, but still only 25% felt this way.  

 

Yet contrary to what we might hope, the response rates do not really improve for members or frequent visitors.  Those who praised their museum for bringing the community together were just slightly more likely to be members of that museum than the topline average for the survey.  And people who visit their museum at least several times each year were no more likely than the topline to think so.  So, the challenge lies with both Core Visitors and Museum Advocates.

 

Things get even more interesting when we look at the percentage of respondents who wanted to see improvement in their museum’s relationship with the local community.  When we posed a different question, “Is there anything where this organization falls short in meeting your needs (and your family’s)?,” only 5% selected “I wish they did more to bring the community together.”  Although this figure seems insignificant at first glance, it points to another challenge we see for museum-community relationships:  the fact that most Core Visitors do not expect museums to play a major role in their community. 

 

We can draw additional conclusions when we compare the responses according to demographic indicators.  First, proximity is a unifier:  the people who are most concerned about the museum-community relationship--those who praised their museum as well as those who wished it would do more--are the hyper-locals.  They live in very close geographic proximity to the museum.  This makes sense.  They are the ones that have the greatest stake in a positive relationship. 

 

However, the two groups are set apart by other demographic characteristics.  Those who praise their museum’s relationship to their local community are generally older, white, and more affluent.  They are half as likely as the topline average to be in their 30s, 93% of them live in Caucasian households, and 52% have annual household incomes over $75,000.  In contrast, those who want museums to improve their community relationship are younger, much more likely to be a minority, and less affluent.  They are less than half as likely to be in their 60s than the topline average, 4x more likely to live in African-American households, and 2x more likely to have annual household incomes under $50,000.

 

Basically the demographic differences boil down to this:  those who think museums are doing a great job at bringing the community together represent the field’s traditional audience types.  Those who think museums need to improve represent audience groups that have traditionally been underserved by museums. 

 

Across the board, these differences have both short-term and long-term repercussions.  In the short term, visitor perceptions about museum-community relationships are directly linked to their general views about their museum’s performance.  Those who think their museum brings the community together are significantly more positive about the organization than the topline.  They are, for example:

 

• Almost 3x more likely to say the organization is important to their community
• Almost 3x more likely to say the organization is a great place to meet community members
• More likely to say the organization meets their needs extremely well
• More likely to be motivated to join or give for philanthropic reasons (83% selected “it is important to support organizations that serve my community” vs. 63% of topline)

 

On the other hand, those who wish their museum did more to bring the community together are significantly less positive about the museum than the topline.  They are, for example:

 

• More than 3x more likely to say “I’m not sure if there’s anything they do particularly well”
• Almost half as likely to praise the convenience of programs and events
• Less likely to praise programs and events or facility/amenities
• Also less likely to praise the museum for engaging all ages

 

The long-term ramifications are also very significant.  The face of the American population is changing rapidly; as the proportion of Americans who comprise the traditional museum audience will shrink considerably over the next thirty years.  Building a strong relationship with the local community is an important method of creating and maintaining relevance to an evolving audience.

We would love to hear your thoughts and questions about these topics.  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.)

Comments

[Tom Reitz]

It would be interesting to know what organizations in their community do museum visitors perceive do a good job of bringing the community together. Is it the local public library? The elementary school? A community event? A civic parade? A neighbourhood park? The shopping mall or the grocery store?

[James Chung, Reach Advisors]

Tom,
Good question. I do a lot of the firm's non-museum work with other community driven enterprises such as municipalities and master planned communities. Organizations that spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to create real community. And the answer to your question is pretty wide ranging.

First off, we're finding that it's not necessarily the bricks and mortar that drive bringing community together, unlike what a lot of community leaders and builders often think.

For example, it's not the elementary school as much as it is a school facility that's used rather effectively during school hours *and* after school hours to bring the community together on a continual basis.

As another example, we've worked with one master planned community where one of the physical hallmarks was a series of parks within two blocks of every home in the community. But the creation of community wasn't so much due to the parks themselves, but how the parks created an opportunity for 'Friday night porch parties,' where every almost every block had a set of neighbors that pulled out a cooler of beers where the adults on that block could congregate on someone's porch after work every Friday while the kids played in the park across the street.

As yet another example, some of the more cohesive neighborhoods in America are coming together around rather heavily trafficked online communities for moms in that community (e.g., Highland Mommies in Northwest Denver).

So as a parting thought (for the moment), we still have yet to find that physical infrastructure or embedded processes give any kind of institution the automatic claim to bringing the community together. Instead, it's often more of a series of tactical steps that provides so much value for residents that much of the community engages with each other much more frequently than if they followed more normal patterns. Sometimes, that's accidental. But sometimes, that's due to a concerted strategy encompassing a series of tactics to do that.

This is a fun topic, and we're more than happy to share more detail on what we've seen in our various studies touching on this issue, and with what our clients have seen work and not work.