Museum Audience Insight

A Thank You Note To Write Home About, Take Two

Wendy Landman did it again.  She sent me another stellar thank you note.

Last year, I blogged about a wonderful thank you note I received from Wendy, the Executive Director of WalkBoston.  So when I renewed our membership this year, I wondered what would happen.  In addition to a formal gift announcement, I received this:

 

So why do I like this note?  Here goes:

    1 - Once again, it is handwritten.  From the Executive Director.  And it is a full-fledged note.

    2 - She thanks me (and, as we have seen, sometimes a simple thank you, which you think would be a no-brainer, doesn't appear). 

    3 - She brings me up-to-date on policy issues important to the organization, and brings national policy issues to a local level. 

    4 - She once again invites me to a specific event that is coming up soon.

It wasn't hard for Wendy to write this note.  My hunch is that she probably does a few a day, and they probably all say the same thing.  That's OK.  The point is, she makes a personal effort to thank her donors, engage them, and invite them to become more involved.  It's lovely. 

We would love to hear your stories of fantastic (or abysmal) thank yous.  To share, 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

Geeking Out Over a Fun Quiz (or, just why you are what you are)

Sometimes, organizations go out on a limb and do goofy things.  If you give the correct prompts on a specific Nestle customer service number, for example, you can learn that cootie catchers are just not as effective as we might have hoped (and what you can do instead if infected with boy or girl cooties).  And GE allows their NBC program 30 Rock to poke fun at them all the time. 

Similarly, we decided to do something goofy and fun . . . and over 500 of you came along for the ride.  We developed a short quiz designed for museum professionals to determine if they were a Museum Dork, Museum Dweeb, Museum Geek, or a Museum Nerd.

Why did we do it?  For a few reasons.  First, it was a fun diversion.  Second, we wanted to run an experiment on viral marketing to test a tracking system in our survey software (more on that below).  And third, Susie wanted a chic "Museum Geek" button (more on these below as well).

Spoiler Alert!  If you have not taken the quiz and want to do so before reading how we determined the categories, go to:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB22A2YE5M69F&MAIB=1

 

Quiz Design

Before we could design our quiz, we had to define our terms.  Online research helped us define the following categories: 

 

• Museum Dweeb – a definition from the 1980s indicated that a dweeb was an East-coaster, particularly those of the Ivy League persuasion.  We expanded it to include the Seven Sisters.  So if a respondent attended either an Ivy League school or one of the Seven Sisters, they fell into the Museum Dweeb category.  Unless they were a Museum Dork, which trumped the Museum Dweeb designation.
• Museum Dork – hmmm . . . how to gently say this.  First, we love Museum Dorks.  Don’t get us wrong.  Museum Dorks love museums.  But there is also an affinity for things of, well, less academic rigor.  So if respondents indicated they enjoyed a good reality-television marathon, or vampire books (or other, let’s say, very light fiction), then they fell into the Museum Dork category. 
• Museum Nerd – Museum Nerds love museums.  Perhaps a little too much (though is that possible?).  Based on our definition research, we determined that respondents who would spend a leisurely Saturday catching up on museum reading/research are Museum Nerds. 
• Museum Geek – Basically . . . . everyone else who loves museums.
• None of the above – Those poor souls who, gasp, actually don’t enjoy visiting museums.
  

The Viral Experiment

We wanted to see what methods of dissemination yielded the most responses, and our survey software had a new mechanism for allowing us to that.

The quiz was sent out in the following ways:

 

• Susie’s Facebook Friends – Susie sent it to 49 of her museum friends.  They, in turn, did some forwarding of their own (thanks, LeAnne!).  102 responses came in via this path.
• Museum Audience Insight blog – 347 respondents clicked over to the quiz from this blog.  Although this is only a fraction of our readership, the blog provided the majority of respondents. 
• Museum Audience Insight e-newsletter – 60 respondents clicked over from our e-newsletter even though it may have a wider readership.  Now granted, the e-newsletter came out about a week after the blog post . . . and it was not the sole focus of the e-newsletter.  
• All other – 4.  

 

In short, quiz-takers were predominantly people we knew fairly well.  But a few broader implications:

 

• Don't underestimate the ability to use Facebook for viral marketing.  Note that we got more responses than the number of invites sent through Facebook.
• Even though we have thousands on our e-newsletter list, note that our Museum Audience Insight blog still drew more responses.  In part because of the timing, but also in part because messages with a call-to-action do better in freestanding announcements rather than when buried with other messages.  
• As a result, we can't recommend enough that museums determine which vehicles they can create to establish channels of communication with their fans, and provide a good flow of information for the audience to keep reading amidst the glut of information out there.   

 

The Survey 'Analysis'

So how did the 'results' break down?

 

• Museum Dweebs – 14%
• Museum Dorks – 17%
• Museum Nerds – 13%
• Museum Geeks – 56%
• None of the Above – 1% 

 

But upon further examination, there were some amusing differences.  For example:

 

• Dorks are more likely to arrive at a museum conference wearing hyper-trendy glasses and somewhat uncomfortable shoes
• Nerds are more likely to question if what they wear at a conference matters
• 100% of Dweebs will pick a trip around the world over going to a museum
• Overall, 47% of respondents were willing to take a drink from the Fountain of Youth over going to a museum, but Dorks and Dweebs were less likely to do so
• Dweebs are less likely to have pets of any kind, while Dorks are more likely to have cats

We hope you enjoyed playing along with our fun quiz and viral experiment.  If you didn’t win a button that proclaims your type, well, there is still hope.  Just track down James or Susie at any of the upcoming annual meetings listed below, and they will have stashes on hand, while supplies last:

 

• Ohio Museum Association (Susie)
• Association of Children’s Museums (Susie or James)
• Canadian Museums Association (James)
• American Association of Museums (James or Susie)
• Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (Susie)
• More conferences - TBD

Thoughts?  Simply click on “comments” below to share your thoughts (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment).

- James (Dweeb) and Susie (Geek)

Surveys and Technical Glitches

We measure everything.  Really, we do.

Before we start, the good news.  102 museums ended up participating in our national (ok, international) study of museum visitors thins winter.  We ended up with over 40,000 responses.  An amazing, deep sample that will allow us to finely segment visitors in interesting ways.  Thanks to all 102 museums that participated.

While we are busy pulling reports and beginning analysis, there are a few things we measured along the way, or responded to, that we thought were interesting. 

First up, technical glitches.  Overall, for a survey of this size, things went amazingly smoothly.  But there were some respondents who did report in technical issues.

In the past few weeks, we responded to about 100 e-mails from individuals who could not complete the survey due to some technical issue, about 1/4 of one percent of respondents.  A perfectly normal rate.  (We responded to each and every e-mail as quickly as possible, and it appears that most technical issues were resolved).

52 of these individuals identified what museum's survey they were responding to, and that presented some interesting data (though keep in mind this is a very small sample):

• 54% were from history-based museums
• 23% were from art museums
• 12% were from science centers or natural history museums
• 12% were from children's museums

In short, three-quarters of identified technical issues came from history-based and art museums, which tend to have significantly older respondent bases than science and children's museums.  And about a third of these respondents had AOL e-mail addresses and were using older AOL browsers.

So what does this mean?  Knowing that a respondent base is older or younger is useful for planning your internet communications.  Internet penetration continues to grow rapidly among older users, but newer internet users may not know what to do with faced with a technical glitch.  Does that mean history-based and art museums should forgo internet communications, or even basic surveys like the one we just ran?  Not at all.  But they may want to plan for more time to help some of their users work around outdated browsers and other issues that pop up.

What did we do?  We had a small selection of standard responses ready, which we could cut and paste into a response, depending on the problem.  Each gave specific instructions on what to do, and any further e-mails from respondents were handled quickly.

Over the next few weeks we'll be reporting in on other things we learned, or counted, along the way. 

Thoughts?  Simply click on “comments” below to share your thoughts (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment).

A Fantastic Survey Response!

Our national (actually, international) survey project is well underway, and we wanted to give you a quick update.

As of 12:00 Friday, nearly 100 museums had launched our survey, and we had 34,782 responses.  An amazing, deep sample.  And responses are still coming in. 

Over 95% of responses are coming from the United States, but we do have a small group of museums from Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and India participating as well.  Thanks again to all of the museums that participated in this project.

In the next few weeks, as we compile and begin analyzing the results, we'll be sharing with you a few things we have noticed along the way about response rates, technical issues, and even the strong reactions a few (very few . . . like single-digits few) respondents had to the survey itself.  

And what will we do with all those responses?  In a survey sample of that size, we'll be able to define and learn about even more segments of museum-goers . . . . 

Stay tuned!