Author: Emma Parsons, Arts and heritage consultant
The Museums sector is one that is always striving to make improvements, to move forward, to be the best that it can be. Those who work within museums and heritage sites are making decisions that affect their organisation every day. Knowledge of the museum’s audiences is a key ingredient in decision-making, alongside staff knowledge and experience
and ideas from elsewhere. It gives you an evidence base and helps you to minimise risk to your organisation.
How much do you know about the make-up of your audience or visitor base? Do you know who is and isn’t visiting, the frequency of their visits, what would make them visit more, spend more, donate or volunteer with you? What could improve their engagement with you and spread the word? And what about who isn’t visiting but could be persuaded to?
This guide will help you to consider what you know about your audiences both current and potential, why it would be worthwhile improving this, and how you might go about doing it. Crucially, it looks at how you can then use this knowledge and insight to deliver your strategic goals and make your organisation more resilient.
By the end of the guide we are aiming for you to:-
- have a better understanding of what we mean by understanding audiences and the importance of this for your whole organisation;
- be able to follow a process that will deliver a programme;
- gain knowledge of the different external sources of support and data, how to use them and how to find out more;
- build confidence to tackle this in-house with low cost alternatives to suit all types of organisation;
- consider examples that are relevant to a breadth of organisations;
- know how to find out more.
Gaining an understanding of your visitors takes time and needs to be a regular undertaking – times and people change and you need to keep abreast of this. If you want to measure your progress you need to gather data consistently over time. So there is no ‘quick fix’ – sharpening your visitor focus takes time and effort. This guide will offer you advice and sources of information that will help you to achieve this whatever your size, location or resource. In the last section the guide works through example cases as well as real life case studies from a range of organisations.
Understanding your audiences could be the first step in you writing an Audience Development Plan, and a key part of your submission for Accreditation too.
Download understanding your audiences (opens in a new tab)