Museum Audience Insight

Free Research Opportunity!

Yet another chance for your museum to participate in a study, for free!

Here is the scoop:

Purpose of Study: We are working with a client to dig deeper into some fundamental questions about how museum audiences prefer to experience history, explore their own and different cultures, discuss race and ethnicity, and be presented with difficult subjects (such as slavery, war, etc.).  We want to know how open different audience segments are to learning about the histories and cultures of people whose experiences may be very different than their own, and what role museums play in informing, sharing, and inspiring visitors with those stories.

Research Scope: We are launching a small study of core visitors to museums in order to gather responses for planning deeper research ahead. We are looking for only 3 to 5 museums to participate by fielding an online survey on our behalf.  While the survey is most appropriate for history museums, historic sites, and art museums, we will consider museums of other types, including natural history museums, science centers, and children’s museums.

 

What Your Museum Will Receive:  Your museum will receive your results, which will be compared to our database of hundreds of other museums’ results for benchmarking purposes in the following areas:  visitor services and satisfaction; primary motivations for visiting; and basic demographic data.  Additionally, you will receive your results on the central line of questioning outlined in the Purpose of Study, above.  Participating museums will be invited to take part in a conference call with Reach Advisors to go over the preliminary findings.  Your individual museum’s results will remain confidential.

What We Will Expect from You: If selected, you will be provided with a survey link and sample text, and asked to send it to your e-mail list this fall as a standalone e-mail (not as part of a larger e-newsletter).  We’ll gather the responses on your behalf.

Cost to Your Museum: Nothing.

Timeline: We expect surveys will launch between September 15 and October 15.  Results will be shared in November.

Participation Criteria: We will be selecting 3 to 5 museums to participate.  We’ll be selecting museums based on geographic distribution, type, and size.  We’ll also “wait list” a few museums just in case a selected museum is unable to participate.  For the stability of individual museum results, we are asking that applicant museums have at least 2,500 contacts on their e-mail lists.

Terms and Conditions: If accepted, the following terms and conditions apply:

• If you are selected for this project, you agree to send the survey to your e-mail list (and other lists, such as Twitter feeds and Facebook fans, if applicable) this fall, and that the e-mail will be a stand-alone e-mail, not part of a larger e-newsletter, in order to increase the likelihood that you will build a meaningful sample size.
• Reach Advisors may contact some of your respondents for follow-up questions or to award survey incentive prizes. Reach Advisors will ONLY contact respondents that volunteer contact information and grant permission for such contact. Reach Advisors will NOT utilize any gathered contact information in any other way.  Any e-mail addresses collected for this purpose will not be shared with the client who commissioned this work.  
• Additionally, you understand that Reach Advisors will be sharing the overall results you, the client, and other participating museums, but that your individual results will be kept confidential.
• Finally, you must agree to the survey as presented by Reach Advisors. If, upon seeing the survey, you choose not to participate in the project, you will notify Reach Advisors immediately of your withdrawal from the project.
• In return for your participation, Reach Advisors will share the preliminary findings with you via conference call. Additionally, Reach Advisors will provide you with your quantitative results via spreadsheet, so that you may compare your results with the Reach Advisors’ database of benchmark data. Reach Advisors will make their best effort to answer further questions in a timely manner, but as a pro bono participant, it is understood that their resources are limited as well.  As a pro bono participant, you understand that the work delivered to you will not approach the same level of Reach Advisors’ more detailed client work.

Interested?  Contact Susie Wilkening at Susie (at) reachadvisors.com by Friday, September 3, providing your museum’s name, location, approximate e-mail list size, and your contact info.  We’ll notify you of your status by Friday, September 10.

Moms and Dads. Now what?

*** Breaking news first!  Next week we’ll be inviting a small number of museums to participate in a new study . . . once again for free.  So make sure to watch for our next post to see if you are interested in some free research! ***

This week we are wrapping up our series of posts on moms, dads, and museum visitation, coming out of our latest survey of museum-goers.  We have shared a lot of data with you, but what next?

First and foremost, when it comes to pleasing parents, we cannot forget the kids.  If the kids are not active, engaged, and interested, you can pretty much write off most parents.  So serving children well through hands-on experiences as well as narrative and aesthetic experiences (we’ll be talking more about how important those are this fall when we dig into our memory work more), is crucial. 

Second, we have to keep in mind the primary motivations of parents, that is, learning opportunities for children, fun, and family time.  When planning exhibits and programming for family audiences, we should be asking ourselves 1 - will the children learn something; 2 – will everyone have fun; and 3 – will this promote family time?  If you hit all three, that is a great first step (and heck, two out of three isn't bad either).

Then there is the third thing, which is where things get trickier, because this is where we want to focus in on the parents, their engagement, and perhaps change their expectations and motivations for visiting.  And that is ensuring that exhibits and programs provide content aimed at the interests and intellects of the parents.  That it will ignite their curiosity, make them excited, create more positive outcomes for both children and parents, and give parents a reason to continue visiting the museum even when their children have grown up and left the house. 

Research has shown that children are more engaged with exhibits when parents participate as well.  But parental participation does not necessarily mean parental engagement if the parents feel it is something they have to do instead of something that excites and interests them as well (never mind that no matter what you try, it seems like there will always be that group of parents who stand back, tap out e-mails or text messages, and totally ignore the museum’s exhibits and programming).   

We don’t have a silver bullet answer on how to develop engagement with parents, but here are some things we are tracking and continuing to research:

• When considering adults without children, only about a quarter enjoy hands-on activities, but young adults under 30 are nearly 2x more likely to enjoy them.  They grew up with them, and long-term, more and more adults will expect them.
• That being said, the most engaged adult respondents under 50, including our Ultra-Curious parents, were more likely to remember narrative-based museum experiences from their childhoods, and were more likely to seek out object-based museum experiences today.  Objects, and their stories, are still incredibly relevant and important to museum experiences for adults and children.
• Parents who go to a wide variety of museums show significantly more adult engagement that parents who only go to a few types of museums that they perceive to be most age-appropriate for children.  Encouraging families to visit history-based, art, and natural history museums, as well as botanical gardens and arboretums, appears to build more sustainable, committed audiences for all museums, benefitting museums of all types.
• Engaging dad appears to increase engagement for the entire family.  How can we further encourage dads to visit museums and infect children (and moms) with their enthusiasm?

The research we have shared over the past several weeks only scratches the surface of our analysis, and on behalf of our clients we continue to go back and examine how moms (and dads, too) do, or do not, behave differently based on the ages of their children, how educational attainment plays a role, and whether race or ethnicity makes a difference or not.  We’ll continue to share the highlights via this blog.

What do you think?  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.)

Visitors? Or Audiences? Or Both?

A few days ago I was asked to distinguish between a museum's visitors and a museum's audiences.  I have to admit, the question caught me a bit short, because I (perhaps lazily) tend to use the words interchangeably.  And as a field we talk about "visitor studies" and we also talk about "audience research." 

Yet it may be important to distinguish, and so I submit to you my first draft definitions, and ask you to agree, improve, or tell me I have it completely wrong. 

• Museum visitors can be defined as individuals who physically visit a museum, participate in a program off-site, or visit virtually by viewing a website, Facebook posting, or Tweet.  These three types of visitors should be counted in three separate categories (on-site, off-site, virtual).
• A museum audience can be defined as individuals who have an interest and engagement with a museum and its offerings.  And a potential audience can be defined as individuals who may have an interest and engagement with a museum now or in the future, depending on awareness, life stage, resources, etc.

That is, I think a visitor is not necessarily an audience member, but an audience member is also a visitor.  Visitor is broad, audience is narrower, but can be expanded to include potential audiences. 

(This brings to mind the recent articles in the New York Times about how the Brooklyn Museum of Art's attendance is down, though they have made significant progress reaching out to younger, and more diverse, uhm, audiences.  Perhaps they are receiving fewer visitors but have a stronger audience base?)

What do you think?  Have I nailed it?  Want to call me out for my total ineptness in defining these terms?  Or does it really not matter?  Let me know by simply clicking 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

It's a Bird, a Plane . . . it's an Excited Dad!

Over the past several weeks this blog has been focused on moms who visit museums (yes, Dan, perhaps obsessively so!).  But what about dads?

We had just over 3,900 fathers of minor children respond to our latest survey of museum-goers, giving us a nice sample to work with (though far short of the 13,000+ moms that responded; please keep in mind that this was a study of regular museum-goers, not infrequent or non-visitors).  Additionally, only 45% of moms reported that their spouses generally visit museums with them, and given that 93% of college-educated mothers in the US are married (and that our sample of moms is overwhelmingly college-educated), this indicates that dads are not visiting, or engaging with, museums nearly as much as moms.

But what about the dads who did respond to the survey?  Generally, they are slightly older than the responding moms, with slightly older children.  And percentage-wise, they generally matched moms for being Ultra Fun, Ultra Family Time, and Ultra Learning in their primary motivations.

But the dads in our sample were over 50% more likely to be Ultra Curious than moms, 14% versus 9% of moms.  An additional 18% of dads fell into the “Latent Curious” category. 

Overall, their motivations are more intrinsic than that of moms.  They are twice as likely than moms to say they are interested in the subject matter at the museum and are significantly more likely to enjoy object-based experiences.  Additionally, they are much more likely to enjoy history-based museums and natural history museums.  For example, fathers of preschool children are 57% more likely to say they enjoy history museums than mothers of preschool children, indicating that fathers may be more likely to view a wider variety of museums to be age appropriate for their children, regardless of the ages of their children.

Unlike moms, dads prefer self-curated experiences (that is, visiting on their own without a great deal of staff facilitation) to hands-on activities.  Moms are much more likely to focus in on those hands-on experiences. . . . except for Ultra-Curious Moms who also prefer self-curated experiences. Dads are also more likely than moms to feel that museums are a good value. 

So the dads who did respond to the survey are overall more engaged, excited by museums than moms.  But what makes them so?  Perhaps it goes back to their childhood museum experiences.  When we examined the memories of men versus those of women, we found that men (including dads) are more likely to remember going to museums with their fathers than women.  Visiting with dad was just more memorable to boys than girls. 

Those museum memories of fathers tended to fall into three categories.

• Dad as tour guide, sharing knowledge and imparting life lessons:  “A war memorial … [My dad] said that learning about what our military sacrificed to gain freedom is EXACTLY what we should be thinking about.”
• Precious time with dad:  “I didn't have to share his attention with anybody else.”
• And dad just becoming really jazzed about a museum and its contents:  “Seeing my dad get really excited about the air and space museum.”

It is easy to picture (and when we go to museums we often witness it because, well, we can’t help watching other visitors).  A family comes to a museum, with a father, and he turns into a big, goofy kid who is excited to be there and share all the cool stuff with his children.  It’s infectious, and it impacts children and their perceptions of museums.  Interestingly, in our not-yet-released research with a group of public libraries, we found very similar patterns.  So our current working hypothesis is:

Dad’s intrinsic interest and motivation for visiting specific museums and libraries increases interest and engagement of children . . . creating memorable experiences for children, particularly sons, who then are more likely to grow up into curious, life-long learners who love museums and libraries.

We want to test this hypothesis with additional research, of course, digging into why dads do not come as often as moms, whether we can attract more dads to museums, and if there is a point where dad comes too much.  That is, if dad comes with the family every time, does it negate the impact we are currently tracking?  Does it become less special?  Does it, for dad, become a chore like it is for some moms?  Or does the impact only become stronger? 

What do you think?  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.)

Image:  Ultra Dad  . . . because dads are just that much more intrinsically motivated!