Visitor Focus

Understand your visitors and supporters – especially the visitor experience – and invest in its improvement

Understanding your audiences

Understanding who will use the museum, what they will want to see and learn, and how they will engage, is fundamental to the success of the museum. Knowledge about visitors and users helps museums identify the objects they want to collect, the stories they want to tell and the types of interpretation they will use. A museum should provide a range of high quality, stimulating experiences for visitors which enable access to collections and provide opportunities for enjoyment and learning. Researching the views of potential visitors, and trying out your ideas for interpretation with them, will be an essential part of planning your new museum.

The AIM Success Guide Understanding your audiences is a useful starting point.

How will you inspire and inform your visitors?

Museums have a unique role in offering inclusive, stimulating interpretation and engaging learning experiences for all visitors and users. A useful first step in deciding how to tell the stories associated with the museum and collections (referred to as interpretation) is to define the themes or stories the museum wishes to tell. Developing an interpretative plan or strategy will ensure that the results of consultations with potential visitors and stakeholders are reflected in the interpretative planning. You can then think about how you will start to display your collection in the museum and how you can reach audiences through other means for example through digital applications or through your website.

The Digital Heritage Hub includes a really useful section of resources on digital engagement activities including marketing, websites and social media and visitor data. Click here for the Digital Heritage Hub>>

Museum Galleries Scotland produced a simple but comprehensive introduction to interpretation.

Museums use a range of materials and techniques to tell stories and engage visitors and audiences. Your museum displays could include a selection from:

• Interpretative information panels
• Hands–on interactives
• Film and audio
• Oral histories
• Trails around the museum
• Collections information available on touch screens in the galleries
• Child-friendly interpretation packs for use in the museum
• Guided tours
• Audio guides
• Specialist publications
• Object handling collections
• Digital applications to download
• Website and online resources.

It is a good idea to engage professional input to develop your interpretative approaches. If you plan to complete the work in-house, ensure you have the necessary range of skills available, including text writing for different audiences. Make sure you consider the needs of people with different levels of need, ability and experience to create an inclusive experience for your visitors.

Think about how you will encourage repeat visitors to your museum, for instance, through refreshing your displays, different versions of an audio guide, offering events or temporary exhibitions.

Additional opportunities for learning

Learning is central to a museum’s purpose. In proportion to its size and scale, a museum should provide a choice of learning engagement opportunities and resources to support the needs of a range of users, both children and adults. For example, a museum may provide a selection of:

• Learning resources and packs for schools
• Specialist learning sessions for schools
• Talks and lectures for specialist and non-specialist groups
• Access to collections information via your website.

Museums deliver learning and education sessions and events on site, remotely via the internet and through outreach and visiting other locations. You need to establish what will work best for the museum and who your target audience will be.

The Group for Education in Museums (GEM) can provide further assistance.

Looking after visitor needs

Museums need visitors, so it is important that visitors can find you; the first place visitors are likely to look for information is on a website or via social media. Making sure websites and social media provide clear information about the museum’s location, directions and opening times and a good flavour of what is on offer is important. The museum should have adequate signage inside and outside the building.

As an organisation welcoming the public the museum needs to demonstrate a good standard of customer care, ensuring that all visitors experience a high quality visit. This commitment to customer care should be evident throughout the organisation, treating visitors and users with courtesy is not just the responsibility of front of house teams, but extends to all areas of the museum, including those answering queries from the public via telephone and email.

Museums can participate in wider visitor attraction quality assurance schemes, which allow them to be assessed against agreed standards for customer care quality; examples of such schemes include The Visit Britain quality assessment schemes and in Northern Ireland. Following basic principles should ensure visitors have an enjoyable and positive experience. A museum should guarantee to remain open for publicised opening hours and think about additional facilities for visitors and users, for example, parking, a cafe, toilets, and a shop. You may not be able to provide a full range of facilities at the museum, but you must be able to direct visitors to where they can find these in the local area.

The AIM Success Guide – Successful Visitor Experience – getting it right, is a good starting point.

Marketing and publicity

There is no point in having a wonderful museum if nobody knows that it exists. Marketing and publicity activities for your museum should start before it even opens so that people know that you exist and what you are going to offer. A targeted campaign will ensure that your audience will know of your existence and consider supporting you and look forward to visiting you when you do open. Consider that you will need to have more marketing activity to support the launch of your new museum and it will change over time as there is more awareness of it with your target audiences.

A budget for marketing is important, even in the smallest museum, and as a minimum you should look at developing;

• a website
• a presence on social media.

Prioritise activity that will best reach your target audience and matches the budget you have available. The important thing is to have a planned approach to your marketing – how can you make your budget work most effectively? Who are the people you most want to reach? What do you want to tell them?

There are often local or regional heritage or tourism groups that you can work together with.

The AIM Success Guide – Successful Marketing for Museums provides helpful guidance

Self assessment questions to help with visitor focus

• How well do we understand our potential audiences’ needs, interests and motivations?
• To what extent does our planning and investment flow from putting our current and potential audiences’ needs first?
• How effective are we in delivering a first-class visitor experience?

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