To help inform how this magic comes together, what can the nation's top brain scientists share that could help the museum field craft deeper engagement with visitors?

As part of our ongoing series of events designed to help clients and friends of the firm gain insights and inspiration from outside the field of museums, Reach Advisors is collaborating with the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute to host a special event during the AAM Annual Meeting.

Our session this year brings together six of the nation's top brain scientists from Johns Hopkins (rated as the #1 hospital in America for 21 years in a row) for an intimate, PowerPoint-free conversation. These scientists want to be grilled by museum leaders about their research on topics such as:

• How do basic cognitive functions support our creative and artistic selves? 
• What is special about the neural activity patterns evoked by beauty? 
• What parts of the brain turn on and off during creative engagement, and what can that tell us about the nature of creativity? 
• What evidence exists that studying the arts and humanities improves children's attention levels, leading to stronger school performance? 
• What kind of research can get funded involving creativity, the arts, and brain science?

The event will take place on Tuesday, May 21, 2013,

from 4:00 to 6:00 pm,

with the discussion starting at 4:30 pm.

Want to join us for this provocative discussion on

art, history, culture, science, and the human brain?

We’ll be selecting ten blog readers to join us

for this special event. 

To join us, please be sure to respond via:

https://www.research.net/s/JohnsHopkinsandReachAdvisorsEventatAAM2013

We can accommodate 40 people in this intimate discussion. Selected individuals will be notified on Thursday, May 16, and will be sent information on the location of the event.

Check out this recent video from the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute to hear more on what these scientists are exploring and thinking:

Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute - The Art of Perception from kindall rende on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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).

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).

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).

In 1727, Joshua Hempstead purchased a slave. 

If you read history (or even historical fiction), this statement might easily be passed over.  Yes, it happened.  Yes, slavery was atrocious.  But the reality of it?  Rather abstract.

That slave was a young man named Adam Jackson.  His life as a slave is likely one of the best documented of any American slave.  And his story is real, palpable, and continues to resonate today.

You see, Joshua Hempstead kept a diary.  For 47 years.  His slave, Adam, worked alongside him, day after day, for over 30 of those years. 

Now Joshua Hempstead was not, shall we say, a verbose man.  But piecing together his life allows us to also piece together details about Adam’s life (as historian Allegra di Bonaventura has done), since they lived and worked together for so long.

Today, the life of Adam Jackson is increasingly a living thing to the people of New London, Connecticut, where he lived at what is now known as the Hempsted Houses, a property of Connecticut Landmarks.  And his life, as well as that of members of the Hempstead family, their abolitionist descendents, and other African Americans from New London history, is inspiring teenagers as well.

This summer, Connecticut Landmarks partnered with Writers Block Ink, an organization that works with teens through the arts to address personal and social issues, to create a youth employment program.  Seven young men delved into the life of Adam Jackson, the history of slavery in Connecticut, and African American history, and on Sunday, I visited Hempsted Houses and their first Freedom Fair to discover how these young men responded to this history.

It was fascinating.  I was so impressed and delighted in how history came alive for them, and for how passionately they felt the stories that they shared.  Through music and the spoken word, they conveyed depth of emotion and feelings of injustice to their audience. They gave Adam Jackson, among others, a voice.

But can an organization like Connecticut Landmarks take this emotion, this passion, and this energy, and bring it to their daily interpretation of this historic house?  Like most historic house museums, this property has relied on guided tours, a method of interpretation that we have found in our research to be polarizing (and perhaps a contributor to attendance challenges at many historic houses across the country).  What would happen if these young men had the opportunity to interpret Hempsted Houses for the general public?  What would they do?  What stories would they share?

Happily, we are going to find out.  Thanks to IMLS funding, Connecticut Landmarks is embarking on interpretive planning at Hempsted Houses, and a component of that plan will involve continuing the youth employment program with Writers Block Ink.  Next summer, Reach Advisors, staff of Connecticut Landmarks, and crack exhibit designer Robert Kiihne, will work with a new batch of young adults and we’ll hand them the keys to the kingdom (so to speak), asking them to develop a visitor experience that is historically accurate but also one they think will be compelling to their friends, families, and regular museum visitors.  And then we will allow them to test their ideas and find out what visitors think. 

We have no idea what they will come up with, but we cannot wait to find out.  We suspect it will be different, compelling, and inspiring to both visitors and to other historic properties.  Stay tuned!

Funding for the youth employment program was provided by the Frank Loomis Palmer Fund.

It’s the product.

That’s it.  It’s simple.  And yet it is extraordinarily hard to execute.

We noted a couple of posts back that those museums with attendance growth tended to attribute it to things the museum had done, while those with attendance decline tended to attribute it to constraints external to the museum.  Thus, an honest assessment about the product you have to share (that is, exhibitions, original objects or spaces, programs, and events) is the first step, so it was refreshing when one of our respondents said:  “About 5 years ago our products were horrible and we were discounting ourselves out of existence.  Invest in your exhibits, make them the best they can be, look for blockbusters.  Then charge a fair price – make your museum valuable and people will want to come and pay a higher fee.”

But the thing is, our client and field-wide research indicates that price isn’t the primary barrier for most regular museum-goers, time is.  Thus, if the actual experience doesn’t match or surpass the anticipated experience, regular museum goers will complain about the museum being a waste of both time and money – not the message you want being conveyed by word-of-mouth or on sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp.  Museums that are committed to free admission, or who have occasional free days, are not immune from this pressure, as time is still precious to visitors. 

Given that museum admission fees are, for the most part, inelastic to most regular museum visitors, reasonable price increases work if the product is of high enough quality to merit the increase.  As one respondent noted, “We raised the bar on our product quality and made the museum a place people WANTED to come to!  People don’t mind paying a higher fee if they feel the product quality is better.”

But we do have a big caveat.  We should note that price does seem to be an issue for less regular visitors and some regular museum goers, particularly families with young children, single parents, and young adults under 30.  If those are primary or targeted audiences, then creative pricing strategies, such as family rates or special prices/times for young adults, may be in order to ensure that admission fees are kept affordable.

Ultimately the goal, then, is to value both the time and the dollars of our visitors, giving them an experience that at least matches their expectations, and ideally over-delivering on this product in a meaningful and memorable way so that connect with the content, objects, experiences, and stories you want to share with them, in ways that change them, and in ways that make them want to support you and share your work with others.

Which brings us back to our other recent field-wide study.  Over the next few weeks we’ll be returning to our recent work on what makes a museum experience meaningful for our visitors, perhaps even transformative.  We hope and believe that this research will begin to help us identify the patterns of the most meaningful and even transformative experiences our visitors will have, and then help you think about how your museum’s experiences can over-deliver in truly meaningful ways. 

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).

But are they ultimately beneficial to museums?  The thing is . . . we don’t know.  Some say unequivocally yes, and others are just as adamant that they are not.  For this post, we’ll share some of the experiences respondents in our recent, quick survey on attendance trends, and we’ll also feed in a few bits of our field-wide and client research as well to hear a bit of the visitor perspective.

Free Days

Nearly a fifth of responding museums reported that they never charge admission fees, while another fifth had occasional, sponsored free days.  Those occasional free days were interesting however, as some museums reported some unexpected challenges. 

First, free days do appear to be a draw for audiences that would not otherwise visit.  As one respondent noted, “Our occasional free days show there is a great deal of interest in visiting museums but admission fees are a real barrier to underserved audiences.”

But those free days can be too popular, as another respondent said, “We have been reaching capacity during free hours this year, which is new for us.  It is not going over well with visitors, in fact they are down right mad . . .,” thus illustrating that free days can go from PR boon to PR disaster if visitors are having negative experiences due to over-crowding.

Additionally, it was noted that too many free days can be problematic as well, as it can depress regular paid attendance or it can reduce the incentive to visit, even on free days (that is, if you have a free day every week, there is no sense of urgency to visit, so potential visitors keep putting it off).  The trick is to find the right balance of free days so that they are well-attended, but not to the point of overcrowding.

Or, perhaps even better, find a different way to provide free passes to targeted, under-served audiences.

Daily Deals

The feedback we received about daily deals (think Groupon, Living Social, etc.) was much more mixed.  Nearly half of responding museums had run a daily deal, and while most were rather ambivalent about the results (reporting “little impact”), some had a negative experience while others loved it.  (When ASTC recently asked for feedback on this same question, they also had mixed responses.)

Those who loved it felt that it had brought in new visitors or members.  As one respondent said, “We feel it is a great way to introduce newbies to the museum . .”  Gina Moreland, of Habitot Children’s Museum, has also had very good results with the daily deals.  She noted:

“We are careful to spread our deals out throughout the year so that we don't cannibalize our sales of visit passes and memberships, for example, we never do deals in the fall-winter when we receive the majority of our visitation.  We also never do a deal on membership - we do deals only for admissions.  To check on conversion rates (people joining or spending other money at the museum after coming in on a deal), we ask for name and contact info at the front desk.  Once they are in the database, we include them on mailings for upcoming events, news, free admission days, etc.”  

Gina estimates that 7% of daily deal tickets go on to purchase memberships and 5% go on to purchase a class enrollment.

On the other side were those who had a negative experience.  One respondent opined, “I believe it devalued our pricing structure . . . Unfortunately, the folks attracted by Groupon-style pricing is not the audience who regularly attends museums or join.  They are . . . looking for discounts.” 

Although we have never asked visitors explicitly about daily deals, we have picked up some feedback about them which generally reinforces this opinion.  In our recent field-wide study of children’s museum visitors, we had a number of respondents explicitly say, “I joined because of a groupon,” or something similar.  Another survey respondent noted she was a member of six museums and was “waiting for botanical gardens to go on Groupon to add that one!”  (I have to say, as a former development director, that one struck fear in my heart!)  Finally, in qualitative work for a client, we had a visitor state, “It also trains the consumer to wait for deals instead of supporting places outright, and with that mentality, we all lose.”  Food for thought.

So daily deals appear to have been quite successful for some, and not-so-much for others.  While we are not going to recommend or not recommend the use of daily deals based on current research, there may be times when a daily deal makes sense, and other times when it doesn’t.  The general sense, however, is that they are good for exposure and first-time visits, but they have little long-term impact on attendance or repeat visits. 

What do you think?  Has your museum had success (or challenges) with free days or daily deals?  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).

We were curious how attendance has fared at museums, given this turmoil.  We’ve been hearing anecdotes of attendance growth as well as attendance decline; sometimes, and paradoxically, both trends have been attributed to the increase in staycations, among other reasons.

In our recent quick survey on attendance trends, we asked respondents how their museum’s attendance has fared over the previous five years.  Over half reported increased attendance, nearly a quarter reported decreased attendance, and the remainder said levels were about the same. 

Interestingly, however, those who reported increased attendance tended to attribute that growth to things museum had done, while those with decreases tended to attribute it to constraints external to museum.

What were the reasons for increases?  Respondents tended to attribute the growth to internal changes, such as: 

• new/improved exhibitions
• new/improved programs, including family programs
• new building/renovation
• improved marketing

And those who saw decreases tended to cite external pressures, such as: 

• fewer tourists
• cuts in school programs
• the economy
• museum budget cuts

Interestingly, of those with decreased attendance, no one mentioned underlying shifts in the population (such as a shift to a majority-minority population, for only one example), and just one respondent admitted to “stagnant exhibits.” 

While most respondents said that they were not anticipating any change in their admission fees in the near future, three-quarters had increased their fees in the past five years.  We were curious if increasing fees affected attendance, but only 13% reported a decrease in attendance after the fee hike, indicating to us that the new fees and the product quality (that is, the experience people have at the museum) were likley in alignment – a subject we’ll return to in a couple of weeks.

Attendance trends did differ by museum type, at least in our sample (keep in mind that this was a sample of convenience, and other samples, depending on who answered, could vary).  History museums appeared to be under the most attendance pressure, while science centers and children’s museums reported the most attendance growth (and were more likely to have increased admission fees recently and/or be considering a future price increase).  Art museums seemed to epitomize the status quo, with the steadiest attendance; they were also the least likely to have increased fees.

Additionally, museums with lower attendance (less than 50,000) had slower attendance growth and were much less likely to have increased fees than museums with greater attendance levels.

In our next post, we’ll examine the impact of daily deals and free days, before finishing off this series by focusing on price/product alignment.  

How does your museum compare with these findings?  Does it ring true, or are you seeing something different?  We would love to hear what 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).

In these discussions we explored both external factors, such as competition for leisure time, competition with other sources of information (e.g., visiting Wikipedia instead of the science center); demographic trends, compression of incomes & wealth accumulation, as well as internal factors, such as product, amenities, messaging, and the value proposition in terms of price & time commitment, especially as it relates to the product.

Today we are beginning a short series of posts on attendance trends, and though we’re not going to cover each and every one of those factors (though much of our larger body of research, both field-wide and client-based, delves deeply into these factors), we did want to share the results from a very quick survey of museum managers we ran last winter on general attendance trends as well as trends in admission fees and how those may, or may not, affect attendance.  

Our quick survey was disseminated via this blog, and 196 of you very graciously took time to respond.  But it should be kept in mind that this was a survey of convenience, and therefore may not be representative of the entire field.  Additionally, it is not a large enough sample for granular segmentation, though we are able to look very broadly at the responses by museum type and admissions size.

To get us started, let’s first look at who responded.  As you can see from the bar graph below, about half of respondents came from history museums, with smaller percentages from other types (respondents could choose all that apply).

Responding museums also represented a variety of sizes (as defined by attendance).  Nearly half had yearly attendance of less than 50,000, a third had attendance between 50,000 and 250,000, and nearly a quarter had attendance over 250,000.

Now that we have a general sense of who responded, in our next post we’ll examine the five-year attendance and fee trends, and also look broadly at how different museum types and sizes fared.

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).

If you look at the family memberships at most museums, they assume a family means two adults and children.  And for a logical reason:  based on our client work, our latest study among children’s museum core visitors and members, and US Census analysis, we estimate that 90% of core visitors with children are married. 

But a third of US households with children are headed by single parents.  That’s a big gap – and a gap that is growing wider by the day.  Since single parents also tend to have lower levels of income and educational attainment, and are more likely to be minorities, the gap becomes more troubling.

This gap has been on our minds for a while, so a comment in that recent study of children’s museum core visitor really stood out for us:

“Unfortunately, we will discontinue our membership when it expires because they no longer offer a [membership] for 2 people.  I am NOT willing to purchase a family membership – at double the price . . . I am a single mom, only [one] income, and only one child.  We will not be able to purchase a Supporting membership (4 people).  This makes me sad.”

Professionals in the museum field talk a lot about attracting more diverse audiences, and having difficulties finding the levers to better attract them.  But are we also setting up barriers when we don’t consider the financial challenges many families do have that put visitation and membership out of reach?

Maybe we need to look at our admissions packages and membership levels, and think about how families that don’t fit that traditional model of two parents + children might fit in.  Can we make these packages and membership more flexible?  Can we do it in a way that is fair to families of all shapes and sizes, but not in a way that is likely to be abused by those seeking an even better bargain (that is, we don’t want families headed by two parents to choose only one parent to put on the membership . . . we want both parents to visit!). 

We are not suggesting that changing membership levels will instantaneously draw more diverse audiences to a museum.  It takes much more than that.  But breaking down barriers that we have imposed ourselves, albeit unwittingly, is a good step in the right direction. 

This post, which touches on admission fees as well, is a perfect segue to a new series of posts we’ll be running in the next few weeks, based on a quick survey we conducted last winter on attendance trends.  We’ll be coming back to our latest research on meaningful museum experiences later in the summer.

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).

Sometimes it isn’t a mom doing the math, and individuals without minor children sometimes do it as well.  But time and time again, in our field-wide studies, we find that parents with young children (particularly moms) are more likely to say they are members for what we call “budgetary” reasons, that is, to save money or to pay for services received. 

In contrast, older respondents, and some younger ones without children, are more likely to give what we call more “philanthropic” reasons, such as helping the museum improve or that the museum is important to my community.

So that gives you an, albeit basic, rundown of how membership motivations play out among various segments.   Overall, it appears that families with young children are more likely to be concerned with the family budget, while other audience segments are more philanthropic in their giving. 

But has anything changed in the past five years?  That is, has this Great Recession affected motivations for giving?

Short answer:  Yes . . . for some.

Five years ago we surveyed nearly 5,500 core visitors to children’s museums, and found that responding parents were more likely to join for those budgetary reasons than they were for philanthropic reasons.  In 2012, in our latest survey of children’s museums, parents were even more likely to join for budgetary reasons, and less likely to join for philanthropic reasons.  It just seems that families with young children are even more hyper-focused on the family budget.

We also examined the membership motivations of the grandparents from five years ago and today, since grandparents, being older, were more likely to be motivated by philanthropy than the family budget to join.  The result?  Not much difference.  That is, responding grandparents (85% of whom are 55+) are still primarily motivated by philanthropy, not the family budget.

Given that the Great Recession has affected younger adults more than older adults, and that inflation-adjusted income has decreased among those under 55 and increased for those over 55, our results should be no surprise.  Families with young children will likely continue to seek out high-value experiences, and memberships, with an eye on the family budget.  The question is, given the long-term ramifications of lower overall incomes, will they ever have the relative luxury of giving for philanthropic reasons? 

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).

In our latest field-wide survey, which included over 8,400 core visitors to children’s museums across the country, we did a little digging around what visitors think the role of children’s museums is.

But first, let’s take a look at who responded, as that affects the results pretty significantly.

Unsurprisingly, the typical respondent to this survey was a mom – 77% of the sample.  Most moms were in their 30s, college-educated, married, white, and three-quarters have a child that is 5 or younger.  This was almost identical to our findings from our 2007 children’s museum study, which tells us two things: 

1. that the "sweet spot" for children's museums continues to be families with the youngest children (pre-school and younger).
2. that there continues to be a persistent gap in reaching more diverse audiences, especially among those with lower educational attainment, minorities, and single parents.  This is not a challenge unique to children’s museums, however, but common among museums of all types. 

Respondents visited primarily because their children love the museum (66%), for learning opportunities for their children (59%), and because it is fun (58%).  These results are consistent with our previous samples from children’s museums. 

When we ran our first children’s museum study in 2007, however, we were stunned to find that only 34% of respondents felt that their needs were met.  In our 2012 study . . . it was once again 34%.  (For context, we generally find a similar percentage of science center respondents say their needs are met, but for art and history museum respondents the percentage is closer to half.  Why the difference?  We think a lot of it has to do with moms with young children being the toughest, most negative audience segment in museums, and children’s museums and science centers serve a lot of moms and their families.)

Since moms in particular tend to treat visiting museums, especially children’s museums, as more of a task to complete than an enjoyable family outing, we were not terribly surprised by the results when we asked respondents what they felt the primary purposes of a children’s museum were.  The top responses were:

• 79% - place for child to have fun and play
• 77% - place for child to learn and develop
• 66% - place for child to get excited about learning

Only one in five felt that children’s museums were places that brought their family closer together. Since only 16% of respondents said they, as adults, were engaged at the children's museums, it is pretty clear that children's museums are generally perceived to be places to visit for your child, and not as much places you visit with your child. 

But keep in mind that these findings reflect what respondents explicitly think of children’s museums.  In later posts we’ll come back to what they, and their children, have found most meaningful and memorable, as they are not quite the same thing.

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).

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).

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).

We would like to thank

Ruth Balbach, Brian Lannan, Lynn Farmer, and Lisa Roath

for their insights into the creative process at Target during the

American Associations of Museum conference in Minneapolis. 

We think a lot. From cutting-edge product design that creates a competitive advantage to building and deploying remarkable customer insights, Target has set themselves apart from other retailers in a very competitive environment. Similarly, museums have to stand out in a competitive environment for leisure time and financial support.

We know from our work in a variety of fields that insights from other arenas can open up new thinking about persistently vexing issues. So we are delighted that different departments at Target's headquarters have graciously carved out time to give us their insider's view.

During the AAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis later this month, we have planned two exciting sessions to better understand how Target thinks, what influences they examine, how they get to know their customers' needs and desires better than other retailers, how they see their worlds evolving in the future, and what ideas museum professionals can take away from how Target views the world around them.

Insider's Session One with a Target Creative Director 

Monday, April 30, 12:30 - 1:45 p.m.

Minneapolis Convention Center 

(very limited seating - 30 max)

Insider's Session Two with Target Management from their Guest Insights, In-Store 

Marketing, and Merchandising Departments 

Monday, April 30, 3:30 - 5:00 p.m.

Target Headquarters (3 blocks from convention center)

(30 max)

We would love for you to join us, but since space is very limited (and we anticipate these will be very popular sessions) we are asking that you pre-register by Friday, April 20. We'll let you know by Monday, April 23 if we have space for you to join us or if you are on a waiting list.

There is no charge for either session.

Click here to pre-register for one or both of our Target sessions. 

We look forward to seeing you in Minneapolis!

If you received a similar e-mail via your e-newsletter subscription, we apologize for the duplication!

Every year AAM's Center for the Future of Museums releases a report, highlighting one or more trends that museums will be confronting in the future . . . or even today.  This year, they identified seven trends to think about.  Some are threats to museums, while others are clearly opportunities.

We encourage you to download and read the report.  It is valuable food for thought as you think about what may affect your museum in the coming days, months, and years.