Museum Audience Insight

Historical Cooties

Imagine:

I have a gift for you.

It is this beautiful teacup and saucer.  Don’t you just love it?

I see you are a little cold, so let me pour you a cup of tea or coffee. 

You will be amazed at how perfect this cup feels against your lip.  The handle makes it a delight to hold.  And the German porcelain keeps your beverage so warm.

I know – aesthetically it is so lovely.  Exactly your taste, isn’t it!

Did you know that this is Adolf Hitler’s favorite teacup too?  This is the actual cup he drank from every morning.

 

So . . . did you take a sip?   

For most readers, if not all of you, I bet the answer is no.  Some of you might have even dropped it.

But why?  It is just a porcelain cup and saucer.  It is, in and of itself, a neutral object.  It isn’t like drinking out of the cup would infect you with any of Hitler’s traits.  And yet I still bet you didn’t take a sip.

That teacup and saucer, it is like they have historical cooties, isn’t it?

 

I’ve been thinking about historical cooties or, more accurately, the idea of magical contagion recently.  It is the idea that an object can become infected with, well, cooties of some sort, and then pass those cooties to others, much like in my example of Hitler’s teacup.  It includes the essential qualities of authenticity, in that an object has to be the authentic object for it to apply, but it adds in an intangible and much more visceral, emotional response that is rooted in the object’s contagious qualities.  Magical contagion isn’t necessarily logical, but it is extremely powerful. 

Psychologists who study this concept often do so in terms of revulsion, much like in my example of Hitler’s teacup, but I suspect magical contagion applies to objects in positive ways as well.  If I wear a dress that was worn by Princess Diana, will glamorous cooties rub off on me?  What if I were writing at Jefferson’s desk?  Would my words flow that much better?  Perhaps.

Of course, magical contagion is all in our heads.  Those objects are just objects.  It is their associations, and how we feel about those associations, that make them contagious, and give them historical cooties (or, if applicable, art cooties). 

In our recent work examining the most meaningful experiences adults have had in museums, we were struck by how original objects formed the foundation for the largest segment of the experiences we collected.  They were particularly crucial for the most immersive experiences, and for those times when visitors felt the strongest emotional connections with the museum and its content.  The idea of authenticity, we felt, explained much of this, but perhaps this idea of magical contagion, which goes even deeper than authenticity, has more to contribute to the connections that are created.

It may also help us better understand why the majority of meaningful experiences we collected are from art and history museums, with comparatively few from science museums/centers.  In fact, psychologists who study the idea of magical contagion have also identified this very issue, noting that science tends to be an “alienating” experience because it separates people from their very humanness, and thus our emotions.  (I realize scientists will cry heresy at this . . . I think science is magical to scientists, and to many children, but that that magic gets lost and is not conveyed often enough or easily to the general public of adults.)

 

All of this leads to just more and more questions for us as we continue to pursue how visitors create meaning in museums for themselves, and how museums have the capacity to emotionally engage and change our visitors.  We are pushing ourselves to examine what goes on in people’s brains and hearts during museum experiences, from history to art to science (and everything in between).  If it takes delving deep into psychology or philosophy, well, we are up for that as well. 

And while we’ll be sharing our in-depth findings with our clients, we’ll share some interesting bits and pieces with you along the way as well. 

 

As a final note, I take no credit for the term “magical contagion,” but instead credit psychologists Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin.  As for historical cooties . . . I am afraid that concept is all mine.

 

What do you think?  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).

 

- Susie

The Lens of Meaningful Experiences

Our last several posts on how individuals connect with and create meaning for themselves in museums have been thought provoking for us, not just because of our research and what we shared, but because of the comments that we have received from many of you on the blog, by phone, and in person.  You have asked us great questions, challenged our assumptions, and sought out clarification.

 

Our overall thesis, coming out of this series, is that museums have the capacity to create truly meaningful, even transformative experiences for our visitors, and that museums need to engender more meaningful experiences if they are going to differentiate themselves, and thrive, in an increasingly competitive environment.   We hope this series has provided you food for thought on how to go about doing just that.

 

So to wrap up this series, here are some thoughts to keep in mind:

• Meaning is only one, albeit important, lens.  This research project looked through the lens of individual meaning-making in museums, but understanding the social aspect of visiting a museum with family and/or friends and the educational role of museums are also essential.  Original objects appear to be crucial for the majority of the deepest museum experiences we recorded, but they are likely not as crucial to the social experience.  Similarly, hands-on experiences are likely to be much more important to learning outcomes than what we saw for hands-on experiences in this work.

• Visitors don’t always explicitly tell us what they need.  That is, we are noting a gap between what people explicitly say they want in museum visits and what they actually found meaning in.  Sometimes people just don’t know how to articulate what they want, so they tell us what they can identify and share, and leave much unsaid.  Sussing out those unsaid, yet important, bits is what we are obsessed about so we can help our clients deliver those experiences as well as the experiences the visitors explicitly say they want.

• Skilled interpretation is crucial.  While original objects are clearly important to many meaningful museum experiences, it isn’t just a matter of having a bunch of stuff out on display.  The objects have to share a compelling narrative that engenders empathy, thus creating meaning and possibly triggering change in how people think and behave.  

 

The research we shared represents only the tip of iceberg, and through this and our client work we will continue to push further and help our clients deliver truly meaningful experiences to their visitors while also pursuing further research on the other, vital, lenses of social engagement and education.

 

What do you think?  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).

 

Photo credit:  Museo Reina Sofía

Finding Meaning in Museums: Exhibitions or Programs and Events?

Museums do a lot of stuff, but for most museums, their bread and butter are the exhibitions that they display.  But museums also spend a lot of time and resources to create programs and special events.

And there are a myriad of reasons to do so.  Programs and special events are fun, draw attention to a museum, give some people a reason to visit for the first time, and give others a reason to return. They can also do things that exhibitions cannot always do, such as going behind the scenes or trying something that just isn’t feasible in an exhibition.  Some simply ooze positive learning outcomes.  We could go on and on.  Programs and special events are great. 

 

But when it comes to create deep meaning and connection for visitors, how do programs and special events compare with exhibitions?  Given the prevalence of original objects in the most meaningful experiences adult museum visitors related to us in our recent research on the topic, we were curious.  So we went back to the raw data to find out.  (See the end of this post for our definitions and a snag we hit in coding.)

Three out of four - a whopping three-quarters - of the meaningful experiences adults shared with us took place in exhibitions.

This makes sense, as this is where most of those original objects actually are. 

 

How did staff, programs, and special events fare?  Not nearly as well. 

• Programs – 6%
• Staff/demonstrations – 5%
• And special events?  Less than 1%.

 

Now we are the last people to say that a museum should not do programs or special events.  Every museum should, and there are many, many important reasons to do them.  They can even be transformative; one that immediately comes to mind is the Follow the North Star program at Conner Prairie. 

 

It’s just that when it comes to the deeper experiences that visitors find most meaningful, those exhibitions that (sometimes quietly) fill our galleries seem to be having an outsized impact. 

Yet museums need to engender those connections and meaningful experiences if they are going to survive, and even thrive, in an uncertain future when a plethora of other meaningful, or even superficial, experiences are competing for attention and for financial support.

 

What do you think?  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).

 

Definitions and Aforementioned Snag

We decided that programs and special events were the types of things that museums would list in calendars of events, and that programs were smaller-scale, repeatable things like lectures, classes, and story hours for children.  Special events were larger-scale activities that less regularly and bring in larger numbers of people, such as a Chinese New Year celebration or a Sheep to Shawl festival.  Your definitions may slightly vary, and that’s OK.

We ran into a snag regarding demonstrations and guided tours.  That is, someone demonstrating weaving at an outdoor history museum might be considered part of an exhibition, but at a different museum it could be a program, or part of that Sheep to Shawl festival.  (Similarly, guided tours are how you see historic house exhibits, while they are a program at art museums.)  We couldn’t always tell from what respondents shared with us, so instead we created a fourth category for staff, demonstrations, and tours.

 

Photo credit:  Erik Daniel Drost

 

 

 

Meaningful Museum Experiences: It's the Cool Stuff!

If you think back to your most meaningful museum experience, what was it that made it so meaningful?  Was it something you saw, something you did, or a mixture?  Did some story just connect with you in some way?    Or did you learn something new that was just interesting?

Over the past few posts we have been sharing some of our latest research, this time on what makes a museum experience particularly meaningful for adult visitors.  That is, we are interested in how adults engage emotionally and intellectually with museum content, and what the common themes are. 

Additionally, we believe that the museums that are able to engage their visitors on a deeper level will be the ones that have a more sustainable future, especially in an increasingly competitive landscape.   (We are also very interested in the social/family aspect of museum visits, but that is a different topic and study.)

 

When we analyzed the nearly 4,000 written-in experiences shared by our survey respondents, there were three big themes that emerged, as well as one ginormous one.

First up, the three big themes:

• Connection to content.  A significant number of respondents felt a deep connection with either the stories shared with them or had an aesthetic experience that touched them emotionally.  In some cases, the connection was inexplicable or surprising. 

I was inspired by a trip to Ellis Island in my early 20s and felt such a connection to the early immigrants that it has stayed with me for years.  I . . .  would love to go back and take my kids so that they could see it and so that I could reexperience it . . .

• Information learned.  Some respondents just simply geek out at the stuff they get to learn . . . those fascinating tidbits that are fun or open their minds to new ideas. 

All museums I have attended through life have provided visually stimulating information and ideas - whether through the creativity of art, information of science or history. It helps open my mind and helps appreciate life all the more.

• Hands-on experiences.  Not just for kids, many adults seek out and enjoy being hands-on as well, and those experiences can be meaningful as well.

Visiting Hagley Museum when they demonstrated life during the early duPont years through hands on experiences . . .  Allowing visitors to participate made it more meaningful and concrete how different life was back then.

But what about that ginormous theme?  Frankly, it left the other themes in the dust.

 

Original objects.  Yes, that’s right.  It’s the artifacts, artworks, and objects we preserve and share with visitors that is most likely to hit their emotional core and create meaning and response in them.

 

Respondents were two times more likely to mention an original object than information learned, and it also appeared over four times more than hands-on experiences.

It was a sketch of some hands that I saw in an art museum. The world seemed to fall away around me as I viewed it. I could have stayed there all day - staring at it and studying it . . .

Yet here is where we also were scratching our heads, because in a field-wide project from 2010 we found that less than half of regular museum goers said they prefer object-based experiences in museums, even among regular visitors to object-heavy history and art museums. 

Thus, it appears there is tension between what regular museum-goers explicitly state about their preferences about museums, and what is actually happening, deep down, creating meaning and sometimes even transformation.  We’ll come back to this tension later this fall.

 

But as Reach Advisors continues to examine this extremely large cache of data, and building on our existing qualitative client work, we are repeatedly finding ourselves coming back to the idea that original objects appear to be the most common, fundamental building block of meaningful, even transformational, experiences for our visitors, both adults and children (as we saw in our recent memory work, and as we’ll come back to in a few weeks). 

 

Although we'll return to the subject of objects later this fall, our next post will look at this data cache one more time, examining the type of experience respondents found most meaningful (that is, exhibition, program, or special event). 

What do you think?  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).

Meaningful Museum Experiences: Initial Findings

As museum professionals, we all likely find great meaning in what we do, and hope that we are providing the most meaningful, memorable, and engaging experiences to our visitors.  We also understand that doing so is likely going to be absolutely crucial as competition for precious leisure time, other educational options, and philanthropic dollars, becomes even fiercer.  How do museums set themselves apart? 

 

In our last post, we laid out why it is important to understand what adults find most meaningful in museum experiences, not only because that is what a museum is supposed to do, but also for future sustainability.  That is, museums that don’t understand how it is they can be most meaningful may find themselves increasingly irrelevant.

To begin to crack this very complex nut, we first examined the over 4,400 adult meaningful museum experiences we gathered in our latest field-wide research, and coded them for what type of museum is being described.  Some respondents said very clearly, naming the specific museum where they had had their most meaningful experience.  Others were clear enough from context, mentioning paintings, historic spaces, or science experiments.  And some were too vague to tell.  We ended up coding all of the responses into the following museum genres:

• Art museums
• History-based museums (museums, historic sites, etc.)
• Science centers
• Natural history or anthropology museums
• Other types (zoos, botanical gardens, children’s, etc.)
• Too vague to tell

 

So what did we find?  First off, despite our asking respondents specifically to NOT tell us about experiences that involved friends and family members, about 10% of the sample answered about their children anyway.  We removed those responses from the sample, leaving us with nearly 4,000 responses to work with. (Note that we do consider the social/family aspect of museum visits to be very important, but that is a different topic and study; we wanted to stay focused on the individual adult experience with museums and their content).

 

The majority of the remaining responses were from art and history-based museums, each accounting for 28% of experiences shared.  Given our previous research delving into early childhood museum memories, these results did not surprise us as history and art museums also turn up in a large share of childhood memories.

What did surprise us a bit was that only 19% of responses recounted experiences from science centers/museums – a respectable showing, but not as high as we had hoped given the prevalence of science centers and how science and technology impacts our daily lives in meaningful ways.  Additionally, the experiences recounted about science centers tended to be more cursory and less detailed than those for art or history museums, again following a similar pattern we saw in our memory work. 

 

Our next post will explore the four major themes we found when we analyzed these meaningful museum experiences, and these themes will shed some light onto why art and history museums did rather well in creating environments conducive to the most meaningful experiences.

What do you think?  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).

Meaningful Museum Experiences

Take a moment and think back to a museum experience you had that you found deeply satisfying, engaging, or intellectually stimulating.  Do you remember how you felt during that experience?  What did you see or do that made that experience so meaningful?  Does that museum have a special spot in your heart? 

In all likelihood, the experience you are remembering exemplifies what museums do best when they truly, deeply, engage their visitors, and it likely illustrates how a museum best fulfills its mission. 

 

We are obsessed with trying to figure out what it is about those museum experiences that have created meaningful experiences for visitors, and figuring it out is absolutely crucial to museums if they are going to survive, and thrive, in an uncertain future when a plethora of other meaningful, or even superficial, experiences are competing for attention and for financial support.

Or, to put it another way, strategically thinking about how to make museum visits the most meaningful for all visitors can put a museum on the path of being relevant, valued, and successful at what it does while also proving the case for support for philanthropic dollars.  Why?  Because we find that adults who have had particularly meaningful experiences appear to visit more often, tell others to visit, are more curious and engaged citizens, are more philanthropic towards museums, and think that museums are vital assets in their communities.  Those are some pretty big reasons.

 

Over the next several posts, we will be looking specifically at adult engagement in museums.  Last winter, in our study of children’s museum visitors, we asked respondents to tell us about their most satisfying, engaging, or stimulating museum experience.  We carefully worded the question this way because we wanted to understand what engaged them content-wise and because we did not want to capture experiences that were really about their children (please note that we do consider the social/family aspect of museum visits to be very important, but that is a different topic and study; we wanted to stay focused on the individual adult experience with museums and their content).  Because parents who visit children’s museums are most likely to be parents that disregard their own interests and curiosity, our sample was going to consist of the toughest adult museum visitors out there – the ones that may not even really think of themselves as museum visitors. 

 

We captured over 4,400 experiences, overwhelmingly from mothers of young children, but also from fathers and grandparents.  While these demographic and life stage characteristics should be kept in mind, it should be noted that we have used similar versions of this question in our qualitative client work, and overall the results that we’ll be sharing over the next several posts are consistent with those who have different demographic characteristics or are in different life stages.  That is, our initial results appear to indicate that the most meaningful museum experiences are rather universal in nature, though there are some nuances that add a lot of complexity to our analysis.

 

We’ll be sharing the sometimes surprising and totally fascinating initial findings this fall, seeking out patterns in what adults find most meaningful and engaging about museums.  Additionally, we’ll be examining how these patterns, and actual behaviors in museums, sometimes indicate unexpressed desires that simply are not mentioned when we explicitly ask visitors why they visit museums.  We don’t claim to have any magic bullets for creating a meaningful and engaging museum experience for all visitors, but we do feel we are making a crucial start on helping museums plan a more meaningful future for themselves and their visitors.

One final note.  We have not forgotten about children and what makes an experience particularly meaningful and memorable to them.  We’ll address that topic in future posts as well!

What do you think?  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).

Meaningful Museum Experiences: Research Background

What makes a museum experience particularly meaningful for children and adults?  We have to admit, we are rather obsessed with this question. 

As we mentioned in our last post, while our field-wide survey work has helped us identify explicit motivations for visiting museums, our more qualitative client work has helped us suss out the types of experiences adults have found most meaningful, or even transformative. It turns out that what people said they explicitly wanted wasn’t always the same as what they found meaningful.

This year, working with 40 children’s museums, we had an opportunity to dig even deeper into those meaningful experiences for adults, while also trying to understand what makes an experience memorable and meaningful for very young children.  It had also been five years since our last field-wide study of children’s museums, so we thought it was an opportune time to check in and see if there had been any shifts in the visitor base at these museums.

So what were our initial questions as we designed this research?  We boiled it down to these:

• Has the children’s museum audience shifted in the past five years?
• What do visitors perceive the role of the children’s museum to be?
• How do explicit motivations and desires differ from what visitors actually value in experiences?
• Why do some children and adults have particularly meaningful experiences in museums?
• How have some museum experiences changed visitors?  What are the common themes, and how can museums “stack the deck” to help more visitors, both children and adults, have meaningful, even transformational, museum experiences?

Our research doesn’t definitively answer all of these questions, but it does give us some greater insights, pushes our thinking even further, and raises new questions (of course!). 

This study required a combination of survey questions, some of which we had used in the past, as well as two carefully crafted open-ended questions.  Forty children’s museums joined us for the ride and willingly sent out survey requests to their e-mail lists and via their social media outlets.  Over 8,400 respondents took time to respond to the survey.

Over the next few months, we’ll share with you our initial findings, give you a peek into our thought process as we conducted our initial analysis, and, at the end, we hope you’ll help us figure out where the research should go next, as we uncover even more questions along the way.

What do you think?  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).

Explicit Desires and Motivations? Not Everything.

There are so many great things about surveys.  They can measure participation or discontent, help you understand who is visiting (or not), and even give you ideas for things your visitors are explicitly interested in. 

Ah.  But note a specific word choice we made there.  Explicitly.  While surveys are great for many things, there are limitations as well, including the challenge of uncovering what people don’t know they want, or  perhaps don’t know how to articulate.

Let me explain a bit more.

It is not unusual for our qualitative work (the work where we interact with individuals on a one-on-one basis, or where we ask open-ended questions) to actually appear, at first glance, to conflict with our quantitative work (e.g., surveys), where we have mostly closed-ended questions.  Upon closer examination there is often no conflict at all, but this illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of two very different forms of research.

So let’s give a hypothetical example.  If we were to ask mothers in a quantitative survey what their favorite things about weekends are, they might choose a response that has something to do with family time.  But if we were to ask them in qualitative research to tell us about a recent weekend they found particularly enjoyable, they might also say something about alone time.   The family time would thus be the explicit desire, but the alone time might be an unvoiced desire that they may find difficult to articulate, not know they actually have, or may not want to admit to. 

These unvoiced desires, in whatever context, do not detract from the explicit ones, but they provide more depth to research and give us greater insights into how to better serve visitors in a meaningful, and memorable, way.  That is, in ways they don’t explicitly ask for, but respond to.

We sometimes think of it this way.  Explicit desires are the things you highlight in your promotional materials, and you also have to deliver them.  The unvoiced, perhaps unacknowledged, or even unknown, desires are the ones you deliver in addition to the explicit ones, and are often the ones that make a museum visit go from good to meaningful, possibly even transformative.  Delivering them may also surprise and delight your visitors.

Why are we suddenly discussing this on our blog?  Over the past several years, we have surveyed over 100,000 museum-going households, so we have learned a lot about explicit preferences.  And, over the past several years, we have done a great deal of qualitative work as well, mostly for our clients.  That work has helped us uncover some of those fuzzy, nebulous, sometimes esoteric things that visitors emotionally respond to, but may not consciously know they seek or may find difficult to articulate. 

To begin to get a handle on all of this, we launched a field-wide survey this winter with 40 children’s museums from across the country.  And while the bulk of the survey was, yes, quantitative and explicit, the real heart of the survey, the intellectual reason why we ran the survey, was two open-ended questions designed to begin to uncover those unvoiced, perhaps difficult to articulate, desires that emotionally connect visitors, both adults and children, to museums and the stories they have to share.

Next week we’ll begin sharing the findings from this research project.  We’ll start off by quickly going over the methodology and some of the quantitative findings, and then turn our attention to a more in-depth examination of particularly meaningful experiences adults and children have had, both in and out of museums. 

Needless to say, we can’t wait to share!

What do you think?  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).