Data initiatives to (better) understand our visitors
Research, theory & evaluation
Although science centres collect a vast amount of visitor-related data (e.g. ticket sales, attendance numbers), few collect them in ways that allow performance to be benchmarked against others. This is because museums vary widely in their capacity for systematic data collection and the methods and metrics they use to understand their visitors.
Recently, large-scale initiatives with shared measures have attempted to build evaluation capacity in the sector. These shared data collection methods allow organisations to improve their decision making by understanding their audiences in the context of wider sector trends.
This session will explore how museums can develop and participate in shared visitor data initiatives to enhance their understanding of visitors and institutional performance. Speakers will share findings and learnings, and participants will be given the chance to engage with online dynamic data dashboards from the projects.
Outcomes: what will participants get from this session? Skills, knowledge, experience etc.
Participants will be able to:
Advocate for the need for their institution to participate in shared data collection initiatives
Understand the different ways in which they can share data with other institutions
Create strategies for increasing their ability to be critical consumers of data to improve their decision making
Apply findings from the large-scale data collection efforts discussed.
Session speakers
Manager, COVES & Learning Metrics
Dr. Ryan Auster, Manager of Learning Metrics at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA, will speak about the Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (COVES, www.understandingvisitors.org), a multi-institutional data collection effort spanning North America focused on driving institutional and field-wide improvement. Specifically, he will discuss the value of a shared, collaborative data project that directly allows for aggregated analysis and comparison across sites.
Head of Visitor and Educational Research
Dr. Inga Specht, head of the department visitor and educational research at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB), Museum Koenig Bonn, will together with Siëlle speak about the data collection initiative of the Leibniz Centre of Excellence for Museum Education from her perspective of one of the involved museums. She will also discuss how this initiative led to a secondary analysis of data from Germany to get insight into one segment that visitor studies professionals often have the hardest time accessing: those who don’t visit.
Leibniz Centre of Excellence for Museum Education
Dr. Siëlle Gramser is employed at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum as project coordinator for the Leibniz Centre of Excellence for Museum Education (www.leibniz-bim.de/en/). This Centre brings together museums and educational research institutes to advance visitor research in Germany through innovative collaborative work spanning both audience research and museum practice. Siëlle will talk about the Centre’s unique approach to visitor research, its struggles and its successes.
Senior Manager for Audience Research and Insight
The Victoria and Albert Museum
Dr. Marie Hobson’s thesis explores how audience research can improve museums’ ability to thrive in an ever-changing external context. In her current role as Senior Audience Research and Insight Manager at the Victoria and Albert Museum, U.K., she leads the re-commissioning of a large scale multi-site audience research project involving a diverse range of science, history and art museums. In this session, she will discuss how to commission this type of audience research work effectively.
Product Manager KulturMonitoring (KulMon)
IKTf - Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung
