PGD Museum Practice and Management
Museums & Learning (CUS 818)
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Assignment 2
Consider and make recommendations concerning how audience engagement is evaluated.
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Submitted to:
Module Co-ordinator: Elizabeth Crooke
Submitted by:
Anna McCann
Student No:
B00814245
Date:
07/01/2021
Word Count:
3317
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Consider and make recommendations concerning how audience engagement is evaluated.
In order to consider how museums evaluate audience engagement, it is important to understand
what audience engagement is and why it is integral to the museum’s work. This assignment
discusses the methods and approaches used by museums to engage audiences and considers the
techniques and criteria used to evaluate audience engagement. This assignment will consider the
requirements for audience engagement and evaluation in Irish museums as detailed in the Museum
Standards Programme for Ireland (MSPI) and argue that audience engagement is best evaluated by
using a combination of formative, summative and observational methods.
Contemporary museum practice recognises that exhibitions only form part of the museum visitor
experience, and that audience engagement is key to the sustainability of museums. In the past,
museums were places of authority, and exhibitions were primarily created as a means of ‘culturing’
the public. Museums spoke to, provided expertise on, and did things to the audience (Crooke,
2015). The visitor experience was one of passive observers and receivers of information, and the
extent of audience engagement was ‘allowing’ visitors to see the exhibitions. Audiences were
‘injected with a message’ that was controlled by the museum (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994).
Today’s museum audiences are ‘expecting more’ and ‘to be involved more with the purpose of the
museum’ (Black, 2012). Audience involvement is central to the museum’s purpose (Weil, 1998), and
as a result, there is a growing need for museums to find new ways to be relevant to their existing
audiences while also reaching out and engaging with new audiences. Museums need people to visit
if they are to survive because without visitors, ‘museums risk becoming ‘lifeless, empty halls with no
purpose’ (Waltl, 2006). In an ever-changing leisure market, where audiences have less free time,
museums compete with other activities and need to offer experiences that make an impact big
enough to encourage visitors and potential audiences to visit and keep visiting.
Audience engagement is not a new concept as museums have engaged with audiences since the
first public museums emerged in the late eighteenth century. The difference between audience
engagement in the past and today is the importance museums now place on the visitor experience
and expectations of their visit. In 1999, Hooper-Greenhill replaced her understanding of the
museum visitor process acknowledging that it had become more ‘transactional and multi-directional’
now that visitors were seen as active participants (Hooper-Greenhill, 1999).
The United Kingdom (UK) Museum Association places audience engagement with collections at the
forefront of a museum’s purpose, emphasising the connection between the museum and visitor and
the importance of museums as places for inspiration and enjoyment. (The Museum Association,
2020)
Audience engagement and visitor experience are also central to the UK Museums Association Code
of Ethics first principle of Public Engagement and Public Benefit. This principle describes the
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museums’ responsibility to engage with the public and involve communities as ‘active participants’
(The Museums Association, 2015).
Museums need to know more about why people do and do not visit to find new ways to reach out to
potential visitors and involve them as active participants. Understanding more about audiences
inevitably strengthens the museum’s identity as a fun and exciting place that offers something for all
people, cultures, and classes.
Visitor studies is the area of museum practice that focuses on understanding audiences. This
umbrella term describes the different forms of research and evaluation concerning museums and
their actual, potential, and virtual visitors (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994).
When introduced in the United States of America (USA) in the 1960s, studies used quantitative
methods to survey visitor numbers across demographics such as age, gender, education, and
geography (Black, 2015).
These studies only showed the number of people within segmented groups who visited museums,
but numbers do not provide a true picture of audience engagement as they do not give any
indication of why they visited or how they felt about their visit. Today, museums use qualitative
methods to find out visitors’ needs and expectations, to understand what motivates visitors to come
to museums, and discover how satisfied they are with their visit (Black, 2012).
With many people only visiting museums as little as once a year, museums need to consider the
needs and opinions of audiences before they can offer them what they want. While museums insist
that exhibitions are designed to reach a wide audience, empty galleries and museums provide
evidence that sometimes what is being exhibited is not what people want to see (McLean, 1999).
Museums need to offer experiences to audiences that will provide benefit, value, and importance.
Stephen Bitgood argues that museum visitors are ‘motivated primarily by value’ and the desire to
‘obtain the largest benefit at minimal costs’ (Bitgood, 2013). Bitgood proposes the value/ratio
concept, which suggests ‘benefit versus cost’ is a critical part of the decision-making process that
motivates audiences to visit museums. He argues that people have to decide if visiting a museum is
worth investing their time and effort in rather than choosing other leisure activities. This view is
shared by Falk and Dierking, who describe the decision-making process of visiting museums as a
‘negotiation’ between the costs of investing time and money and the benefits of the value of the
experience (Falk & Dierking, 2013).
Museums need to find out what the visitor wants from the museum and the factors involved in the
decision-making process that made people choose to visit. Knowing as much as possible about
what audiences want from their visit is far more preferable than guessing what they want from their
visit.
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Visitor surveys engage directly with audiences, providing insight into all aspects of the visitor
experience, including what motivated them to visit the museum on that particular day, whether they
were satisfied with their visit, or elements where the museum could improve. Surveys can also
provide information about engagement that happens outside the museum, such as virtual events
and online content. According to Falk and Dierking, the major cost of visiting a museum for most
people today is time and effort, therefore, people need to believe that there will be some benefit and
value to them personally in spending their time visiting museums (Falk & Dierking, 2013). Surveys
can reveal the actual visitor experience, providing feedback that measures visitor expectation,
satisfaction, and loyalty. Survey questions to help with engagement should ask how visitors felt,
what they valued, what could be improved and whether they would consider returning in the future.
Information gathered from visitor surveys can be used across all museum-audience touchpoints and
can prompt immediate changes or drive long-term programmes and strategies for audience
engagement. Visitor studies and surveys can be linked to specific programmes and exhibitions and
employed before, during, and after visiting the museum.
In museum practice, the term ‘engagement’ describes the methods used to interact with visitors,
attract diverse audiences and retain new visitors. Engagement encompasses any aspect of
programming used to promote the museum and correlates to all aspects of the museum’s work. It
relates to areas where museums connect with people, including exhibitions, workshops, educational
outreach programmes, guided tours, printed literature, marketing, hands-on interactives, visitor
services, and digital, online content.
Museums and their audiences are unique, so there is no one correct method for successful
engagement (Black, 2015). Audience engagement should be an ongoing programme that changes,
develops, and builds on the museums’ relationship with the community and enables audiences to
connect in different ways with collections. Museums have to develop approaches and adapt them to
suit their collections, projects, and audiences.
Today, more museums are using collaborative methods of audience engagement, which involves
working in consultation with diverse groups and inviting them to participate in the planning and
design of museum programmes. ‘Visitors now sit on exhibit-development committees, speak their
minds in research and assessment programs, and even contribute to visitor-generated exhibits and
labels in exhibition galleries’ (McLean, 1999). This audience-centered approach places people in
the middle of everything the museum does, involving them more as ‘active participants and less as
passive spectators’ (McLean, 1999), which makes the end result as much about the audience as it
is about the objects on display.
Audience centered museums consider ‘the personal context of the visitor and the nature of their
visit’ and use this information to ‘respond to audiences as partners in a joint exercise’ (Black, 2005).
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Working in collaboration with audiences creates ‘lasting enjoyable experiences’ from which visitors
‘can take their own personal meaning’ (Falk & Dierking, 2000), which is vital to engagement as
visitors are more likely to return if they can make personal connections with museums and see
themselves reflected in exhibitions (McLean, 1999).
Mike Murawski proposes that museums must ‘work toward valuing and celebrating the unique
identities, experiences, values, skills, and passions that individuals bring to the institution if
museums are to be truly inclusive and audience-centered (Murawski, 2018)’. Therefore,
engagement through collaboration is an excellent way for museums to get to know their audiences
and turn exhibitions into more ‘connected two-way conversations’ (McLean, 1999) that speak with
many voices and offer audiences different perspectives.
Research into audience engagement in the past was driven by the need for museums to justify
economic spending in areas where the museum claimed to be making a social impact. Museums
were fuelled by accountability and had to measure outputs for funders (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994) that
showed value for money and the success of exhibitions.
Research on visitor numbers provided a quantitative way for museums to measure audience
engagement and for museums that were required to generate income to stay viable, visitor numbers
also indicated economic success or failure.
While visitor numbers and ticket sales quantified how many people engaged with the museum, they
offered no additional information such as why people visit, what people expected from their visit,
how people felt about their visit or if the museum succeeded in delivering an experience that met
their expectations. Fleming noted that museums exist to deliver services to audiences, not profits
(Fleming, 2015); therefore, evaluating audience engagement should concentrate more on visitor
experience rather than visitor numbers.
Museums are expected to fulfil their role in society as a place for learning and enjoyment. With an
increased focus on the active role of visitor participation, museums use evaluation methods to
assess how successfully services are being communicated to audiences and to ensure goals and
objectives are being delivered.
Michael Patton defines evaluation, as ‘any effort to increase human effectiveness through
systematic data-based enquiry’,
stating that people are engaged in
evaluation when they ‘examine and
judge accomplishments and
effectiveness’ (Patton, 1990).
Evaluation should be a planned
process with SMART objectives that
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identify specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic goals. The purpose for the evaluation should
be clearly linked to anticipated outcomes.
For audience engagement SMART objectives could include increasing the number of people
engaging from underrepresented communities, improving audience satisfaction, increasing the
frequency of engagement, or improving the numbers of people engaging. The anticipated outcomes
could be determining how well messages are being communicated in exhibitions or discovering how
audiences felt about the museum experience. Different evaluation methods can be used depending
on what is being evaluated.
Chandler Screven put forward the process model of front-end, formative, and summative evaluation
which is widely used in museums to develop programmes and exhibitions. In Screven’s model,
front-end evaluation takes place before exhibitions are installed, formative evaluation takes place
during the installation process and summative evaluation takes place after the exhibition opens
(Screven, 1990). This process model can also be used to evaluate audience engagement.
Front-end evaluation allows for engagement with existing visitors, and provides the opportunity to
engage with target audiences and non-visitors before the project starts. This type of engagement
allows museums to hear different ideas, understand how audiences feel and identify what they
expect from the project.
Formative evaluation takes place before the project is finished and provides the opportunity to
consult with those involved, check the project is on track to meet its objectives and allow for any
necessary changes. Formative evaluation increases the sense of ownership and active participation
for those involved throughout the process.
The success of a project can be assessed by summative evaluation that takes place after the
project is completed. Summative evaluation uses methods such as surveys, questionnaires, and
interviews to measure the value and benefits of the project as experienced by those who engaged
with it. Audiences are asked about their overall experience and their responses determine how well
the project met its intended outcomes compared to responses from front-end evaluation. The
information gathered from summative evaluation can impact on future planning for audience
engagement and lead to changes and improvements across the museums work.
Audience engagement can also be evaluated using observation methods that track and time where
visitors go, what they do inside the museum, and how much time they spend at a particular exhibit
or in a display gallery. Observation originated with Robinson’s investigation of the ‘behaviour of the
casual visitor in museums of art’ which was conducted over two years and turned ‘passive
observation into active inquiry’ (Robinson, 1928). The method involved observers selecting visitors
at random and attempting to record as much as possible about their behaviour as they moved
through the display and if they looked at something for a noticeable amount of time. The observer
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considered simple, definite questions during the observation process, such as ‘What do people do
when they come to this exhibit? How long do they stay? Is there any easy and natural manner for
prolonging their stay? What do they look at? What do they pass by?’ (Robinson, 1928). These
methods produced useful, meaningful responses and provided quantitative and behavioural
information.
Timing and tracking have become one of the most consistently used, reliable methods of evaluating
and understanding engagement through observing the behaviour and non-verbal behaviour of
audiences in museums. These methods, can provide a wealth of information such as, how visitors
navigate the exhibition space, what holds the visitor’s attention, and how visitors interact with
objects on display. Observing visitors’ interactions can identify where collections are successfully
connecting with audiences as visitors need to notice objects and look at them long enough if
meaningful engagement is to take place.
There has been criticism of the observation approach because it focuses solely on observing rather
than talking to audiences and ignores the affective outcomes of exhibitions, visitors’ feelings, and
moods as well as the role of visitors’ interests (Economou, 1999). While observation methods
identify which areas of the museum are attractive to visitors, interviews with visitors provide
information about the visitors’ behaviour and feedback about the visitors’ experience.
Observation tracking methods can be time consuming, labour intensive and expensive. One
alternative is the proposed method of self-report mapping by visitors. The process asks visitors to
self-map their routes through the museum and track themselves on maps using timestamps at the
start and end of their visit. This method provides information similar to that obtained through direct
observation but at a fraction of the time and cost. Studies showed that self-report mapping was an
‘effective adaptation that provided rich and accurate data’ and ‘influenced the amount of time
visitors spent in the museum, encouraging them to spend more time’ (Rainbolt, et al., 2012). Selfmapping provides the opportunity to find out how the audience felt about their visit as participants
are asked to describe their chosen routes around the museum to staff after their visit.
There is no doubt that observing visitors provides valuable information about audience behaviours
in the museum, but to understand audience engagement, observation should be used in conjunction
with other methods. Combining observation with visitor questionnaires, comment cards and surveys,
makes it easier to link the observed information about visitor behaviour with actual opinions,
thoughts, and experiences of visitors (Bollo & Dal Pozzolo, 2005). The advantage of combining
evaluation methods is that museums can get to see how visitors behave in museum spaces, what
they interact with, what they walk past, and which areas are not being seen, while also getting to
know their audiences better through summative face-to-face engagement. Combining more than
one method of evaluation allows museums to make changes and improvements based on what
actual audiences want.
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Museums today can also understand what motivates people to engage by tracking online behaviour
and monitoring how visitors respond and interact with the museum’s web-based content. Analysing
engagement through social media also provides a real-time understanding of how visitors react and
engage with content (The Audience Agency, 2017).
The Heritage Council established the Museum Standards Programme for Ireland (MSPI) to
‘benchmark and promote professional standards in the care of collections and to recognise through
accreditation the achievement of those standards within the Irish museum sector’ (The Heritage
Council, 2022).
The MPSI consists of a series of seven detailed minimum standards and objectives that recognise
international best practice in museums. Standards are identified under three headings,
Management, Collections Management and Public Services. The standards relating to audiences
and engagement fall under Public Services. Standard 5 - ‘Exhibition’ deals with evaluating both
temporary and long-term exhibitions using visitor surveys. In order to meet the minimum standard,
museums need to provide evidence of regular methods used to evaluate exhibitions, and are
required to submit a copy of a recent visitor survey.
The survey must include details of the number of visitors surveyed and visitor ‘responses to the
exhibition and museum in general’ (The Heritage Council, 2022). Surveys should collect information
on what worked and didn’t work, what was learned from the exhibition and what improvements
could be made.
A factsheet offering further
guidance proposes six
questions that can be used
to evaluate audience
satisfaction of the
exhibitions and offers
advice on how best to
conduct the survey, such as
who should undertake the
survey, how many people
should be surveyed, when
the best time is to survey
and how to analyse the
data.
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Standard 7 - ‘Visitor Care and Access’, relates to audience numbers and statistics. Minimum
standards require museums to have a system of recording visitor numbers that produces
quantitative information that can be analysed monthly and annually.
Factsheet 10 provides a template of
the minimum requirements that must
be included in a visitor statistics
survey.
This survey can be adapted to suit
the museum’s needs, for example, it
could include information resulting
from visitor books and comment
forms or record statistics related to
specific exhibitions and events.
The MSPI minimum standards relating to audiences and engagement predominantly focus on
summative evaluation that records quantitative data such as visitor numbers, rather than qualitative
data such as visitor expectations and experiences. The current standards do not require museums
to find out more about what audiences want or what the visitor experience was like. It would be
beneficial for the MSPI to recommend using additional methods, such as front-end evaluation and
observation as part of the standard relating to visitors. This will make museums better informed to
develop and deliver engaging content because they have an improved understanding of who is
visiting the museum and why. Audience engagement should be an integral part of a museums work.
Corsane describes museum work as ‘a process of communication moving from resources at one
end to public outputs at the other (Corsane, 2005)’. By allowing visitors to participate in activities
that they can have ownership of, and they consider worthwhile, museums can create different
experiences for audiences and create engaging ‘public outputs’.
Falk and Dierking consider the museum experience ‘in its totality’ from everything that happens from
when a person first thinks of visiting a museum, the actual visit, and to after the visit, when the
person recalls the experience as a memory (Falk & Dierking, 2013). Understanding the visitors
experience is the most meaningful way to evaluate audience engagement. Knowing why people
visit museums, looking at what visitors do in museums and asking how they make meaning from
their visit is best achieved through a combination of formative evaluation, observations and
summative evaluation based on a continuing dialogue with audiences after their visit.
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