Thinking About Your Museum Audience
G-Gina Koutsika - Head of Gallery Learning, Natural History Museum, London
In this paper, I will use one audience segment as an example of how we museum professionals can find out information about our visitors so that we cater for them. I will briefly mention the resources that already exist, the need to learn from experts, to work with colleagues from other departments and to carry out further studies in order to form a comprehensive picture.
My underlying assumption is that we always use our professionalism and expertise in our work. Visitor studies inform our decisions and assist us in making better judgement. They should not be seen as a replacement or an excuse for us not to think hard about our work.
I have chosen adults that are either local or day trippers (not overseas tourists) as a case study, because in family-friendly museums like the Natural History Museum, adults are sometimes overlooked. Families are considered the backbone of our audiences. However, we should not forget that actual counts often show that adults (childless, empty nesters) are those that care more about the museum and are the most devoted visitors. Adults are most often those who are frequent visitors and who rank museums highest as leisure places they value.
Resources
So let us imagine we want to find out about our adult visitors. There are relevant resources around. We are very likely to be able to answer our questions about our visitors, if we look wider than the museum - studies field. Leisure science, consumer behaviour, psychology and sociology are fields that can offer direction and lead. In addition, academic research and evaluation from other institutions can help us build our own body of knowledge and add to our physical and electronic files. In addition to books and periodicals, we can find resources on the websites of professional bodies, blogs, on-line journals and post our questions to relevant list-serves. A couple of organisations that can get us started are:
• The Visitor Studies Group www.visitors.org.uk/- a UK based organisation
• Visitor Studies Association www.visitorstudies.org/ - a US based organisation
• Australian Museum Audience Research Centre www.amonline.net.au/amarc/ in Australia
Experts
There are a large number of academics and practitioners that have looked at museum visitors and have often been looking at very similar questions to ours. Let me present a couple of examples of experts. I have chosen colleagues that are still alive and care about the field. They operate in the US as I did not want to be seen to favour or exclude colleagues that have for the last 30 years been working in the field of visitors' studies in this country. Let us imagine that our question is why do adults visit museums?
Over 25 years ago, Marilyn Hood first wrote (and further evidence she and others collected still support her initial findings) that most adults come to the museum to have a good time, in whatever way they define that. For some, it is learning, for others it is the social interaction or active participation aspects that draw them in. The latter care more about sharing a leisure experience with people they care about than having an educational experience.
Marilyn Hood also argued that frequent visitors and one-of visitors have very different motivations for visiting. Her findings supported that the frequent adults come primarily for the what: what's offered, what the museum is featuring. Even though frequent visitors do not usually comprise the majority of visitors, they sometimes make up just under half of the museum's overall visits. Most of our visitors are not regulars and they come for the how of the event: how the presentation is offered and experienced, how they share the event with other people, how the event relates to their daily life. These findings might not surprise us now but they were revealing for their time.
Moving to more recent years, let us look at John Falk's theory of museum identity-related motivations . John argues that historically, research on why people utilize leisure venues like museums has been descriptive rather than theoretically driven. He continues that we need to see visit motivation as inextricably connected to visitor behavior and learning. We need to see visit motivation as a contextually-specific construct intimately bound up with an individual's desire for satisfaction, identity and well-being in a particular place at a particular moment. John supports that identity ranges from identity with a small "i" to Identity with a capital "I". The "I" Identity is historically viewed as a conscious, semi-permanent quality of the individual such as gender, race/ethnicity, profession, and religion. "i" identity is continuously constructed, often as an unconscious, biological and personal response to the world. It is highly "Situated" and "Emergent", being a parent, a friend, a tourist.
According to John's findings' museum Identity-Related Motivations come in 5 types:
• Explorers - i.e. to learn something, curious, find something new ...
• Facilitators - i.e. to facilitate the experience for a child, a friend visiting
• Experience Seekers - i.e. tourists
• Professional/Hobbyists - i.e. interested in trains, history of fashion
• Spiritual Pilgrims - i.e. awe, something bigger than themselves
For my final example, I will use Martin Storksdieck and Jill K. Stein , two colleagues that took John's research and applied it in a venue. They came up with a similar list that can be easily communicated to our museum teams. Their research confirmed that adults come to the museum to:
• Learn: the curious and interested
• Connect: the serious leisure/hobbyist or professional
• Share: the socially oriented
• Feel: the spiritually moved
• Check off: "have to be there"; "have to know this"
Each time a visitor comes; they enact, express or create an identity.
Marketing
Historically marketing has not had a good reputation within most museums. This is primarily shows our lack of knowledge and understanding of the marketer's role. Working closely with our marketing officer/department is someone can only help us understand and cater for our visitors.
First, Marketing can provide us with our visitors' demographics. Demographic surveys commonly ask for details of age, sex, group composition, educational background, social class and normal residence. Through them, we get to know who uses and who does use our institutions. There are five ways we can respond to our visitors' demographics. (PmcManus)
• We can decide to invest more resources and better meet he needs of the present visitor profile and as a result encourage more repeat visits.
• We can decide to target non-visitors who fit the present visitor profile and as a result increase our visitor numbers.
• We can decide to target groups that are neither visitors, nor do they fit the current profile. These would be different underrepresented groups and targeting them enables us to diversify our audiences.
• We can decide to combine strategies for all of the above, aiming to increase visitors, visits and widening our representation/
• Lastly, of course, we could do nothing.
The Natural History Museum visitors
The Museum commissioned a study to assist with defining audience priorities in the summer 2005. Our consultants used standard demographics to create a series of audience priorities that were Core, Developmental or Experimental. It also identified ways of ensuring that the audience was central to our decision-making process, including that audience research lies at the heart of programming and that clearly prioritised audience segmentation, with appropriate targets, should drive the decision-making process. Segmentation by impairment, ethnicity and social grade was not included because ethnic origin cuts across age, geographic, formal learning, informal learning, and type of visit.
Local adults and adult day-trippers were seen as developmental.
Following the initial work, our Marketing Department worked with another external company to look more specifically at audiences who had more of a propensity to visit the Museum within the wider leisure market. Using the consumer marketing survey Target Group Index (TGI) , an analysis was undertaken of all visitors to leisure attractions in general (i.e. museums, galleries, theme parks, zoos, heritage sites etc) and segmented this market into 6 different audience types based on attitudes and behaviour. On the basis of this research, two adult segments were identified as potential visitors to the Museum. These were the Culture Pleasure Seekers and the Learned Liberals.
The Culture Pleasure Seekers include students and young professionals making the most of life. They are active people, with many friends and a social life. They have a clear hedonistic streak and have a clear interest in the arts & culture.
The Learned Liberals include slightly older, middle-aged people who are either independent adults, have older children or are empty nesters. They are cultured, liberal, socially aware and strong-minded. They are spiritual, adventurous and like to be challenged.
Further research showed that Cultured Pleasure Seekers (students & young professionals) mainly come to the museum it is trendy. They see it as a space to chill out and relax and are attracted by the temporary exhibitions. The above apply to both local and one-day trippers.
Learned Liberals (middle-aged culture consumers) visit the museum for intellectual stimulation and discovery. They want to be inspired. Local adults also see the museum as a place to relax.
Project Evaluation
In addition to the literature search and the market research, project evaluation can complement and deepen our understanding of our visitors and non visitors. Project evaluation takes place at different stages during the development of a project.
Feasibility study
Feasibility studies take place at the very beginning to evaluate possible benefits of implementing an idea or system. It often involves a combination of a market study and an economic analysis that provides knowledge of both the environment where a project exists and the expected return/outcomes to be derived from it.
Front-end evaluation
Front-end evaluation occurs during the exhibition development stage to gauge audience interest levels and prior knowledge about the subject. It is used to develop stories, goals, communication messages, broad learning outcomes and interpretative strategies.
Formative evaluation
Formative evaluation happens during development and production to test exhibition components, such as text, labels, graphics, interactive, as well as the specific communication messages and learning outcomes. It takes place during the developmental stage and it allows the findings to be incorporated into the project. Prototypes of the exhibition components are used.
Summative evaluation
Summative evaluation uses a variety of methods to measure the success of an exhibition or programme. It can reveal what learning occured and whether the exhibition/programme delivered the messages that were intended.
Most of our more recent studies can be found on the Natural History website www.nhm.ac.uk . A couple give us information about our adult visitors. In the Darwin Centre pahse Two front-end evaluation, we found out that adults wanted to learn how scientific research was relevant to them.
Knowledge management: piecing it all together
The limited literature research, the Museum's market research and the recent project evaluation has given me some insight into what adult visitors want from our institutions.
Playful, but not childish, opportunities
Adults like playful but not childish opportunities. They like to play and enjoy themselves. They do not like to be treated as children nor do they like to interact with exhibits that remind them of children's activities, i.e. nature table at school, cut & paste, floor puzzles. Adult-interactives need to have sophisticated humour, look adult-friendly and encourage talking and sharing among their group.
Cognitive learning
Adults require greater intellectual stimulation. They like to be challenge and learn new things. They want to know how things work and how we know. Adults are hungry for information and get easily annoyed by trivial interpretation (i.e. top line- basic introduction). They do not see enjoying themselves and cognitive learning as opposing things.
Similarly to other visitors, they like opportunities for multi-sensory experiences, such as multi sensory exhibit or different exhibits, each emphasizing one or more senses. They want to have different routes to access the same message and reach the same outcome.
Structure
Adults need to control their own experience and amount and depth of information they access. In order to achieve that, they like to have a clear structure of the logic and organisation of the exhibition. They need to know what an object is and why it is in this particular exhibition. They appreciate having advance organisers, maps at different points and a clear idea of what is expected of them.
Presentation
Adults are more critical than families, school visitors. They pay attention to the presentation and the updateability of displays. Adults dislike poor presentations and exhibits that are not well maintained. They are likely to repeat if there are new things and if the environment is aesthetically pleasing.
Fit for purpose
Adults appreciate dramatic seeing iconic dramatic objects. The real thing at close quarters is a powerfully motivating, especially if it has aesthetic qualities or is presented in a context.
Adults are not keen on the latest fad. They are less likely to engage with interactive exhibits than children or families and appreciate computer interactives that enhance the exhibition and are not just 'button-pressing'. Adults like to have a balance of artefacts & specimens, panels, drawings and technologies.
Relevance
Adults like to see connections that exist between themselves and the museum. They want displays and programmes that relate and connect the collection and the museum research with everyday life. They want to know the impact of things in their own life, an interpretation that provides 'human interest' and makes the subject relevant to them. Most adults like a sense of history and connection from the past to the present and to the future. However, the older adults get the more they are motivated by nostalgia.
Acting on visitor studies
Looking around our museums it often seems that we do not act on all the things we know about our visitors. There are a number of reasons for this, including financial issues, institutional priorities, political pressures and other external factors. However, there are also a couple of symptoms that most museums suffer from.
First is the notion that a lot of museum professionals hold for their institution. This notion is that our museum is unique. Therefore, national or international research findings ofmuseums or museum audiences don't apply here. All museums are more alike than they are dissimilar, and there are commonalities between museum, zoo, botanical garden, nature center, historical site, and aquarium that make application of findings from one setting to another appropriate and sensible.
The second is that lack of institutional memory. Often things happen because one or a small team of visionary individuals move something forward. When they leave, they often take with them the knowledge and drive that existed.
Lastly, museum professionals do not seem to learn from their mistakes. Either because individuals like to forget about them, because the institution does not acknowledge that mistakes are part of progressing or because teams change.
Visitor studies data is most likely to be acted on when there is senior management support - the Director actively supporting and genuinely believing in audience research; when audience research is an integral part of the project structure and processes and when teams have audience advocates that understand visitors and potential visitors.
As Paulette Mc Manus (1999) wrote much of the value of visitor study work comes over time as you gradually get to know the people you are working to communicate with.
Concluding
If we are interested in getting to know our audiences, first we need to segment and prioritise our audiences. Then we need to work with colleagues in other departments and other institutions to collect what information already exists. There is so much research around, often at our fingertips. We have to look, listen, learn judge & decide what is applicable in our institutions. When needed, we can carry on more visitor studies to build the picture. Piecing all of the information together and communicating the results in our teams is the only way we can ensure that we create audience-centred, relevant work.
G-Gina Koutsika - Head of Gallery Learning, Natural History Museum, London
G-Gina Koutsika is currently Head of Gallery Learning - Audience Advocate at the Natural History Museum, London. She is about to take up her new position as Head of Interpretation at Tate Britain. Prior to joining the Natural History Museum in 2004, Gina worked at the Science Museum, London, the Foundation of the Hellenic World, the Hellenic Children's Museum and Christies the auctioneers. She holds an MA in Museums Studies and a MBA. She is Deputy Chair of the Visitor Studies Group, European Representative of the Visitor Studies Association and active in a number of other museum organizations.
Sources:
• Bitgood, S & al, (1993) The role of Group Composition and Exhibit Characteristics on Adult Visitor Behaviour , Visitor Behaviour, volume VIII(3) 9.
• Bitgood, S. & Patterson, D. (1993). The Effects of Gallery Changes on Visitor Reading and Object Viewing Time. Environment and Behaviour, 25(6), 761-781.
• Griggs, S (2006) Formative Evaluation Workshop, NHM (unpublished)
• Falk, J, Storksdieck, M & Stein, J (2007) VSA Conference presentation (unpublished)
• Hamilton P, (2007) NHM presentation (unpublished)
• Hein, G. (1998). Learning in the Museum. London: Routledge.
• Hood, M, (1991) Misconceptions held by Museum Professionals, Visitor Behaviour, volume VI (1) 4.
• Hood, M (1993), After 70 years of Audience Research, What Have we Learned? Visitor_Studies volume V(1) 16-27.
• Gammon, B, & Burch, A (2002) Independent Adults: who are they? What do they do? Science Museum Visitor Research Group (unpublished)
• Kelly, L, (2002) Australian Museum Audience Research Centre AMARC Information Sheet
• Dr Paulette McManus (1999) Getting To Know Your Visitors Association of Heritage Interpretation Volume 4(3)
• Screven, C. (1990). Uses of Evaluation Before, During and After Exhibit Design. ILVS Review,1(2), 36-6.
• Serrell, B. (1997). Paying Attention: The Duration and Allocation of Visitors' Time in Museum Exhibitions. Curator, 40(2), 108-125.