Museum Audience Insight

How Does Your Restroom Rank?

We didn't really mean to continue in the cleanliness theme this week.  Really.  But when this floated across my desktop just moments ago, I knew I had to share.

We have mentioned more than once on this blog how important cleanliness is to the current generation of parents.  My Gen X peers who are parents are just more likely to be germaphobic (and I am too, despite not being a parent). 

Turns out, there is a website, www.sitorsquat.com, complete with an iPhone applet, that combines ratings of restroom cleanliness with a mapping tool.  So you can always find a clean restroom nearby. 

So I started playing with the site, out of professional curiosity (of course - though I had to share it with my sister first!).  After checking my hometown, Quincy, I started checking to see if I could find any museums.  The Met gets 4/5 stars and a "sit" recommendation, while the National Museum of Natural History in DC gets 5/5.  But most of the museums I searched for were not listed at all.

People notice restroom cleanliness, and it is important to them.  It indicates that visitors are cared about.  For some people, it can make or break a visit.  And now they have a way to share where the "best" ones are.  Or where the "worst" ones are. 

Yes, the site is a little goofy.  But if I were running a museum, I would make sure that my clean restrooms were added to the site.  And I would not turn away people who come in just to use the restrooms either.  They might end up staying . . . or coming back.  Because the more people we get in the door, the greater the chance we have to reach people, touch them, and engage them.  Even if it starts with our clean restrooms.

- Susie

The Ick Factor: Museums and Cleanliness

I have always been a bit of a neat freak, but since my son Jack came along, I freely admit that I am even more concerned about the cleanliness of my home and public places, especially since he is not quite over the urge to stick everything in his mouth.  It’s not just the dirt and germs that bother me; it’s also the potential residue from nasty cleaning products.  Who knows how long it’s been since anyone cleaned the restrooms, shopping carts, and stair handrails at the places we visit—and what was used to clean them?  

 

Call me an overprotective parent if you want, but according to research conducted by Reach Advisors, I’m not alone.  Many parents (and some non-parents too) are really concerned about cleanliness in public places, including museums, and they vote with their feet when a place doesn’t meet their standards.  And it’s not just the restrooms that catch their attention, but exhibits and food service areas.  As one mom in our children’s museum survey said, “Museum exhibits are filthy,” while another noted that the "food concession . . . dirty."  We can, and we do, opt to avoid a museum that doesn’t seem clean enough.

 

Along these lines, I recently discovered several additional reasons to love ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center in Burlington, Vermont.  Not only do Jack and I have a great time there, but the place is usually pretty spotless.  Moreover, I was pleasantly reassured to read in Sarah Brophy and Elizabeth Wylie’s The Green Museum that ECHO’s custodians use Green Seal certified products.  Better for the environment, and better for me and my kid.

 

As an added bonus, during one recent visit, we actually saw a custodian making the rounds of the exhibit areas (pictured).  While I followed my kid from fish tank to frog tank, I watched a staff member cleaning everything meticulously—from the benches, to the hand rails, to even the signage suspended in the air.  What a simple and inexpensive way of reassuring the overanxious parents among your visitors!  You aren’t adding any staff, having employees work extra hours, or investing in new cleaning equipment, just doing the same thing you might do after-hours, but in clear sight of the visitors.  This technique probably wouldn’t work at the busiest of times.  But during an average or a slow day, it just might. 

 

All this contributes to my resolve to return to ECHO frequently—even during flu season. 

 

—Erica

 

Photo credit:  Tom Billings, ECHO custodian at work, photo courtesy ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center

The Tour Bus: Cash Cow, Soon-to-Be Relic?

At many historic sites, they really start showing up in spring and the fall.  Pull into the parking lot at a major historical site and you will see a whole line of them.  Tour buses.  Typically, they are filled with older adults out on a day trip or perhaps on a multi-day swing through New England or the plantations of Virginia.  

They show up at art museums too.  And botanical gardens.  Some museums teem with them during the shoulder seasons—just after or just before the peak travel seasons—when retirees tend to travel and school is in session. 

But who takes bus tours?  And what does the future hold for them?

In our research for outdoor history museums and in the Connecticut Cultural Consumer research project (funded by the Connecticut Humanities Council), we asked Core Visitors to museums if they took bus tours. Turns out, not many do. In fact, hardly any.  Only 3% of respondents to both surveys said that a bus tour was among their primary means for visiting museums.  Three percent.  The audience segment that was most likely to take bus tours were women over the age of 60. 

Yet even with Core Visitors who are women over 60, bus tours are still pretty darn unpopular. In both studies fewer than 10% said they participated in bus tours. 

So what does this mean?  There are two big things to keep in mind here.  First, while tour buses can certainly help with attendance and revenue, the behaviors of people who go on tour buses do not correlate closely with Core Visitors, much less Museum Advocates.  Their primary purpose for taking a tour may not be visiting your wonderful museum, but something else—it might be travel, social or that stop before playing the slots.  Their levels of engagement will likely be generally lower than the Core Visitors, who made a choice to visit your museum rather than take a tour that just happens to include your museum.  Absolutely, you still should serve them well, and some participants will be highly engaged, but generally these tours are cash cows on the decline.  It is OK to admit it.

Looking ahead, we strongly believe that the tour bus is a relic.  The generational differences between those older than Baby Boomers and the Baby Boomers themselves are striking.  Boomers are generally much more confident planning and going on trips on their own.  With that independent streak, we cannot imagine large numbers of them will support the tour bus industry during their retirements. 

There may, however, continue to be a place for small, intimate tours led by curators and museum directors for their donors.  These tours will be expensive, exclusive and include behind-the-scenes access to your museum.  They will likely not be profitable for you, but when your museum runs its own profitable curator-led tour, favors will be returned and collections storage will be opened. 

But long-term?  The bus tour is a relic.  Milk that cash cow while you can and be prepared for diminishing returns long-term.

What are your thoughts?  Click on “comments” below to share.  (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.)  Please include the name of your museum as well!

Men and Museums

When we run surveys, we can sometimes derive a lot of insight from more than just the results, but the inputs as well.  And there’s one statistic that we found perhaps more startling than any others.  When combining all of almost 30,000 respondents to our various field-wide museum surveys, only ¼ are men.   

Additionally, looking at it from another angle, only 1/3 of women in their thirties and forties report visiting museums often with their spouse. 

Where are the men?

To be honest . . . we don’t know and perhaps that’s the subject of another study.  But this is what we do know.

While looking at the overall picture of core visitors, only ¼ of our survey respondents are men, the percentage varies from survey to survey.  In both the study of outdoor history visitors and Connecticut cultural consumers, men comprised about 1/3 of respondents.  They were ¼ of science museum respondents, and just 11% of children’s museum respondents. 

A bit of this can be explained away by the general behaviors of men.  Men are less likely than women to sign up for e-mail newsletters, our primary vehicle for soliciting survey responses of core visitors.  Underlying this as well is that women are still the primary driver for museum visitation in most families, writing that membership check, and making the connection. 

This is reflected by the graph, below.  Men in their thirties, as you can see, have the lowest response rate, at only 13% of thirty-something respondents. 

In contrast, 38% of respondents over seventy were men, a response rate three times that of men in their thirties (and this despite the fact that women over seventy outnumber their male peers, demographically speaking). 

Men in their thirties, who are typically parents of young children, are just not responding.  And they are way outnumbered by women at museums across the country. 

The early indications from this preliminary data is that dads have, like moms, chosen to downplay their own needs and interests in favor of those of their children, and that when children are very young, moms are driving museums choices.  But as men age, they have more ability to drive which museums they visit, and hence, engagement increases in a straight-line progression with age.  There is, however, another nagging possibility that needs further exploration.  Is there an older generation of men that understand the value of museums in a way that younger generation of men simply won’t get? 

Bottom line?  Just like we have a challenge to engage moms, we have a double challenge with dads:  Reaching them and engaging them.  Clearly, this is an area that warrants further examination as we dig deeper with future research.  The gap is simply too big to ignore.

What are your thoughts?  Has your museum done something that attracts men (especially younger men)?  Click on “comments” below to share.  (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.)  Please include the name of your museum as well!