 "Museums represent humanity in all of its breadth, wonder, rawness and beauty. A world without museums would be less human. Simple as that." - Respondent, 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers It's the question we all ask ourselves, all the time: What is the impact of museums? Yet within this question lie many deeper questions. What is the impact we have on children? On adults? Our communities? Is there a ripple effect, with those who don't visit museums still benefiting in some way? The initial answer is yes, of course. No question we have impact. But defining that impact, isolating it to museums, measuring it, assessing our effectiveness, well, we all know that is far trickier. Yet nothing is more important to measure. After all, this is the articulation of why we matter, not only to those who visit us, but to everyone. Unsurprisingly, then, impact was a big theme in the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers and Broader Population Sampling. And the good news is that both museum-goers and non-visitors happen to think we do some pretty great things. Overall Findings - Museum-Goers So what are the top five impacts of museums, according to museum-goers? In descending order, that museums make us:
Pretty fantastic, right? And what is fascinating for me to see is that when I look at all of the cross tabs and filters that help me segment museum-goers, I see that these impacts are fairly consistent, regardless of life stage, demographics, and geography (I'm thinking red state/blue state). Sure, there's some movement and nuance (we'll get to that), but overall, the values that underlie these impacts are universal. (Respondents could also write in other impacts, and some great things were shared, but nothing really jumped out as significant.) Broader Population My broader population sampling returned a similar, but not exactly the same, ranking. In this case, however, the majority of respondents are non-visitors projecting impact on those who do visit museums.
But while the overall percentages were lower for the broader population (not a surprise), it is interesting to note that the percentage responding "more creative" is actually pretty consistent across both samples. What's Next to Share These top impacts do, of course, merit more scrutiny around who, how, and why. I'll be looking at four of these impacts more closely, and sharing more nuance, over the coming weeks. Supplementing this quantitative work was an open-ended question museum-goers were asked to consider: imagine a community or world with no museums. Turns out, the loss-aversion tactic works really well in helping people articulate the role museums have played in their lives. These responses will flesh out the how and why of what I share. The responses were also overwhelmingly heartfelt and stridently in support of the significant role museums play in people's lives. So much so that every day I post a new, randomly chosen, response and share it on my Facebook page and Twitter feed (@susiewilkening). Follow me in either place for a daily dose of "hey, you matter!" But I want to push back a bit on the one impact I won't be focusing on: well-rounded/broadened horizons. To be fair, I think this is a fantastic impact, and is one I would certainly choose for myself and for what I hope museums are doing for my own children. That being said … the values it embraces are inherent in the other four impacts. Indeed, I would say being well-rounded, with broader horizons, comes as a result of the knowledge, curiosity, empathy, and creativity that museums cultivate. I'll wrap up this series with a release on revisionist history. Because even though that wasn't my question (at least, not in this survey), some comments on Confederate monuments, and a perception of the past being "changed" came through. They may have only been a handful of comments, but the themes they reflect, in today's polarized society, matter deeply to our work. Methodology Notes In my 2017 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, I asked respondents to share with me what they felt the impact of museums in their life had been. Their open-ended responses were amazing, and I shared many of them last year in a series of posts. For 2018, I took the most common themes from those answers and created a close-ended question so that we could assess what percentage of museum-goers had experienced each outcome. I then developed a similar question for the broader population, asking them to identify the impact of museums on those that visit. But asking about impact directly doesn't always give museum-goers room to articulate the role museums actually place in their lives. In the 2017 survey, one respondent mused, “Can you imagine a world without museums?” Great question, so I included it. Make the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers possible! Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.
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 In today's busy society, when and where do families have high-quality family time?
Think about that for a moment. As parents shuttle children to activities (especially once they hit school age), and devices have infiltrated the lives of children of all ages, family time has gotten lost. It doesn't happen because the family isn't home together much. It doesn't happen because car time, for many children, is device time. It doesn't happen at restaurants because, again, devices. And it doesn't even happen at home. At home, parents are getting things done around the house, dealing with work emails, kids are doing homework (if they are even home), and everyone can stream what they want onto whatever device they want. Now, I am (admittedly) over-generalizing. And I am not indicting today's parents (honestly, parents today can't win because we are also accused of over-helicoptering). Over the past couple of years, I have been observing an increasing sense among parents that there are few places that truly promote family time. Parents tell me how hard it is to have those moments of family time, and they often do indict the increase of devices in our lives. Family time now has to be deliberately planned as out-of-the-home outings to places that promote real-life engagement and forced family time. And museums serve that role for many museum-going parents, because museums are about shared experiences and learning. (That doesn't mean museums should be anti-phone, by the way. After all, parents do want to take pictures and document those shared family experiences. But the data is overwhelming that visitors want object-based and hands-on experiences in museums, not digital ones.) The findings on family time in museums, however, also presents a bit of a conundrum. While half of parents explicitly say that one of the reasons they visit museums is for family time, only about a third say stronger connections with family is an outcome of museum visits. Additionally, among the broader population, only a quarter of parents think museums strengthen bonds among families. So what we are presented with is an impact/articulation gap (just like we saw when we looked at the families and curiosity data). We have strong evidence of this significant motivation and impact among families, which is worded in strong terms in qualitative work as well. Now we need to help more museum-going families bridge that impact/articulation gap by clearly articulating ourselves that we promote strong family connections by allowing families to "hit a reset button to the frantic scurry of modern life," as one museum-going parent shared. This creates a positive cycle of association and impact that can (and should) encourage broader audiences of families to visit museums either more often or in the first place. After all, this is now a primary differentiating factor of museums; few other places provide multi-generational experiences that nurture family connections. It also significantly strengthens our case for support. While our most significant impacts are rooted in the content that we share, this doesn't mean that outcomes that are not content-based, but catalyzed by the experience itself, are not significant. They are, and powerfully so. It is our work, however, to measure that impact, share it, and help our visitors be more conscious of it and articulate it for themselves so that our impact can spread and deepen. And if you are asking yourself about those other impacts, both content and experientially-based, that research is coming up next for release. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  Do you have questions about your audience, and what they think about you? Questions about potential audiences you'd like to understand better? Do you want to learn more about your impact in your community? Do you need to track your progress over time? Are you on a budget? The 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers can help you with all of these things. For your museum's $1,000 fee,* you'll receive your museum's custom results from the 2019 survey, including:
Additionally the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers works best when many museums participate. The deeper the sample, the richer the insights for each individual museum. How?
Additionally, all of the research releases at The Data Museum, the infographic Data Stories I share so broadly, and broader population comparison sampling are made possible by, yes, the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers. So please, if you value my work, and want to see more of it in the coming year, join the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers. To enroll, simply fill out this short enrollment form. For more information, please see this informational PDF, or get in touch with me at susie (at) wilkeningconsulting (dot) com. *$1,000 fee applies to museums that launch their survey in January or February 2018; the fee increases to $3,000 for museums that launch March 1 or later. Approach any museum-going parent or caregiver on the floor of your museum and ask them why they are there. I bet you they say things like the museum is educational, fun for kids, and/or it is a good place for the family to visit. All fantastic reasons for visiting. But those reasons, wonderful as they are, don't really help us understand what the impact of museums are for children or their caregivers. Why? Well, impact is harder to articulate. It is harder to see. Parents and caregivers can see their kids learning and having fun, but to extrapolate out to what impact those new learnings have, well, that's harder. Yet it matters. Deeply. Hardly anyone questions that museums are educational (97% of Americans agree they are, as we found when I did public polling for AAM). But lots of experiences are educational. Thus, if we need to make a case for why museums matter (and we do), we need to not only say we are educational, but why what we do is better than other experiences, delivering better impact. In the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers it was important to get a better handle on impact by building on the 2017 Survey's open-ended question on impact (The overall results will be explored more thoroughly in research releases to come.) When it comes to impact, 70% of parents said that museums helped make them more curious about the world, their top choice. This was followed by "more knowledgeable" and "more well-rounded/broadened horizons." But the curiosity thing was, well, curious. And that's because it isn't an explicit motivation. That is, only 21% of parents of children 10 and younger chose "curiosity" as a motivation for visiting museums … yet it was the most important impact of museums, with 71% choosing it.  Additionally, 94% of these parents say it is more important for museums to cultivate curiosity than help children perform better academically.
So what's going on? Clearly, curiosity isn't the quick-to-articular motivation for visiting museums. Those other reasons (learning, fun, family time) are more immediate, pressing, and motivating. Curiosity, while a highly valued impact, isn't any of those things but instead takes a lifetime to cultivate and benefit from. The immediacy of those other things, and the longer-term horizon of curiosity, creates an impact/articulation gap that turns out to be really important, especially when we back up and examine this more broadly. To start, while only 6% of museum-going parents said it was more important for museums to focus on academic achievement than curiosity, 26% of the broader population of parents said likewise. Looking at that 26% of the broader population of parents, and also the 6% of museum-going parents, was illuminating. In both samples, these respondents were significantly less likely to have a college degree. Additionally, among the museum-goers, they were nearly three times more likely to be parents of color (even when controlling for education). Both groups were also significantly less likely to cite curiosity as an impact of museums overall. The marked difference in education in both groups (and likely, by extension, socio-economic status) is troubling, as is the difference between whites and people of color. I don't know why the difference, and I say that because I haven't asked. That is something that absolutely needs to be done. I do, however, have a hypothesis. It is easy for well-educated museum-going parents (who are also overwhelmingly white) to say that curiosity is a necessity. That having a curious outlook yields better outcomes in life (which research does tend to support). But curiosity is expensive. It is expensive to nurture because it is an ever-hungry beast that needs resources to feed it. It needs museum visits, books, camps, and supplies. It also needs adult time and energy to feed. All of those cost parents and guardians in some way, and that makes nurturing curiosity a privilege that some parents have capacity to provide, but many cannot. (I've written some about capacity before; it bears reviewing.) For those who are working hard to take care of their families, but have limited capacities to do more due to external constraints in their lives, it would be easy to see a direct line between academic achievement and better outcomes … even if that direct line doesn't directly take into account what motivates someone to achieve in the first place. And for respondents of color, I hypothesize that the negative economic outcomes resulting from systemic racism may have a similar result, even when educational attainment does reach the highest levels. I also realize, however, that my hypotheses may be misguided or wrong. If so, and you have your own hypotheses, I encourage you to share them with me so that future phases of research can incorporate those ideas as well. But given the essential birthright all of us have to curiosity, if my hypothesis is correct, it is incumbent on museums to do more to provide more opportunities to more children to cultivate curiosity … and thus benefit from it over a lifetime. That is, after all, one of the most important impacts of our work. And how? It actually goes back to making it easy. Logistically, of course. We're not easy to visit (as we already know), and that has to get better. Reduced/free admission, such as through Museums for All, is a great start, but it also has to be about access, transportation, being welcoming to all, or going to where parents and caregivers already are. We should not underestimate the time and energy costs of visiting as well. We also need to be an easy solution for all parents in their need to help their children succeed. Some museums are working on this through effective partnerships (looking at you, Discovery Museum in Acton, MA, who was recently featured in the New York Times). We need more … much more … of this. But to increase the curiosity capacity in all children, low-income, middle-class, non-visiting families, and yes, our regular museum-goers we already have, we also need an overall image reboot that represents a new value proposition to parents that we are their easy solution to some of the pressures and obligations they have, as parents, in their lives. And then we need to make it so. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  "I look to museums to help me teach my child. I need all the help I can get!" - This and all quotes from parents responding to 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Parents and caregivers are stressed. They are trying to pack a lot of things into a busy schedule (and affordably). Sometimes, even if they want to visit a museum, it just seems so hard. So hard to pack up the gear, deal with timing and a toilet-training toddler, corral children into the car, motivate a tween to come along, and then get out the door to stand in line and, hopefully, have a great day. So we need to make it easy. And when I say that, I don't just mean easy to visit logistically (though we need to do that too), I mean making parents lives easier. Be a deliberate, explicit solution in their lives.
Being easy means fulfilling needs. Parents today are barraged in their life with advice about how to make their kids smarter, better thinkers, more compassionate, better athletes, and so on and so forth. Ad nauseum. It is relentless. And it isn't always clear how to best accomplish any of it. Which brings us to museums as solution.
In the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, I asked museum-going parents to consider what a community or world without museums would be like, and how it would affect their parenting. Most were horrified at the thought, and shared how a lack of museums would make their job as a parent so much harder. For example: Parents don't always feel they have the ability to nurture creativity in their children:
Parents realize they don't have the expertise to explore every subject with their children:
Parents don't have the time and resources to create interactive experiences for their children:
And parents would struggle to make the complexity of the world tangible (at least, not without the help of museums):
I could go on (after all, I have thousands of these quotes). But for all of these parental challenges museums are a primary answer. And without museums around to provide these things, parents would feel even more pressure, stress, and anxiety.
Now, most museum-going parents don't articulate this role of museums in their lives, that museums make their job easier. Indeed, as I recently shared, most parents find museums only slightly more pleasure than pain to visit. Why? Because parents are in the weeds of everyday parenting, and are seeing the everyday challenges of getting kids out the door to a museum. Consciously thinking about, and articulating, the overall impact of museums is not something most parents take time to do. Yet when presented with a world without museums, that impact became instantly clear to them. So, museums are already a solution … a unique, easy-to-access, solution for parents. Museum-going parents can articulate that. But we need to do a much better job of articulating it for parents, and presenting museums as a feel-good, affordable, easy solution to encourage broader museum attendance from all families, whether museum-going, casual visiting, or non-visiting. Because when we articulate and deliver on these needs our impact is clearer, our case for support is stronger, and our ability to transform lives expanded. By the way … if you would like a daily dose of a randomly selected #imaginenomuseums quote from museum-goers, follow my Twitter feed @susiewilkening or my Facebook page @wilkeningconsulting. Make the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers possible! Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  The leisure time crunch. It's what parents experience on most weekends … a list of things that need to get done, children to keep an eye on, children to shuttle around, and then falling into bed, exhausted. As shared earlier, 45% of museum-going parents report they get zero relaxation during leisure time. So if you have a busy family, and exhausted parents, where do museums fit in? Are museums an obligation, something one does for children (just like all good parents do), or is visiting fun and relaxing? And how does all of this affect what parents think about the impact of museums? Let's take a look at what parents said in the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, and try to sort this out. Exhausted Parents First, the bad news. Exhausted parents are more critical museum visitors. Compared to parents who felt more relaxed at the end of the weekend, exhausted parents were:
I'm not surprised. I have those weekends too, and they make me crabby as well. Sometimes the idea of an "enrichment" activity for my kids makes me want to go hide under the covers. So it is no wonder that, for many museum-going parents, museums are seen as yet something else to fit in, and thus somewhat painful to visit. The Pain/Pleasure Index So how painful is it really to visit museums? To find out, I asked parents if visiting museums was more work or more pleasure. Respondents were given a slider, and asked to choose where visiting museums fell, which turned into a numeric score for me (which was then easy for me to average across segments; thus, if 100% of respondents said "total pleasure", the score would be 100, while a score of 0 would mean 100% of respondents said "hard work").  Overall, parents scored museums a 55 … only slightly more pleasurable than painful. Not a great result. Two factors were most likely to affect the score:
But then it gets more interesting. The more parents visit, the more likely they are to consider museums "hard work." Additionally, those recurring visitors (especially with younger children) are more critical of museums and have generally more negative responses overall. (Note the opposite is true among those who are not parents of minor children: then, more visits then equals happier visitors.) The pattern, then, is of stressed, high-visitation rate parents who feel obliged to visit museums in order to provide their children with enrichment and learning, but just are too exhausted to enjoy it themselves. Since these stressed-out parents are nearly half of museum-going parents, and it isn't like the other half are relaxed and engaged 100% of the time either, it begs the question: what can museums do to make visiting museums a stress reducer in parents' lives? How can we be a solution in their lives, not just one more thing to cram in? And if we can figure this out, would it make visiting museums more appealing for casual and non-visitors as well? Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.  When I think of museum-going parents, there are two main types I think of:
Based on who responds to the surveys of different types of museums, it has been possible to make assumptions about visitation patterns by museum type. That is, since parents overwhelmingly make up the majority of science center respondents, but only a fraction of art or history museum respondents, that tells us that families are much more likely to visit science centers than art museums. We all knew this from our own, personal, observations as well. In the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, however, I actually asked parents about their visitation patterns by museum type. Since having children, which types of museums are they visiting more, about the same, or less? And while it largely confirmed our assumptions and observations, being able to back it up with data and some of the nuance that came through this question are still helpful. Caveats: first, memory is a funny thing, and respondents were asked to think back and make their own assessment of visitation patterns before/after kids … their memories could be wrong; and second, respondents were asked if they were visiting more/less, not if they had visited 10 times or once … which means a "more" response could still mean only one visit a year if they didn't visit that type of museum before children. Thus, this is an analysis of visitation patterns, not visitation rates. Art Museums Imagine a young couple who enjoys visiting art museums. They have a baby. What happens next? If they follow the pattern the data shows, a third of these types of visitors will cut back on their art museum visits. That's right, art museums effectively lose a third of their young adult audience when parenting begins. Do they come back? Yes, mostly. Sort of. Among museum-going parents, many seem to have returned as regular visitors when their children reach elementary school, and by middle and high school, audiences seem to have even grown a bit. Similarly, among the broader population of mostly non-museum-goers, young adults without children were close to twice as likely than parents to say they would be interested in visiting an art museum. So, bottom line, parents of young children don't see art museums as family friendly, and while that changes as kids age, they never reach the intensity of participation that science centers capture. But there is one more twist. On a city-by-city level, the results can vary widely. In a few cities, art museum attendance actually grew among families - even among families with very young children - indicating that each of those cities has an art museum doing a fantastic job with family engagement. In most cities, however, art museum engagement declined. Thus, the losses are clearly avoidable if the art museum does thoughtful and engaging work with families. (This last finding also highlights the value of a group of museums in a community all participating in the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, creating a cost-effective, city-wide sample where deeper insights that benefit all museums in a community are possible.) Botanical Gardens and Arboreta Overall, botanical gardens and arboreta do much better when family formation begins: 40% of museum-going parents report visiting more often, while only 11% report cutting back. Additionally, once individuals have children, visitation patterns hold steady regardless of the age of those children. History Museums and Historic Sites The pattern for history museums is a bit mixed. Overall, parents are about 3 times more likely to report increased visits than fewer visits (41% vs. 13%). But that overall positive result masks challenges with families of very young children, who were only slightly more likely to report increased rather than decreased visits to history museums. In contrast, however, parents of elementary schoolers were nearly 5 times more likely to report increased rather than decreased history museum visitation … and parents of high schoolers were 10 times more likely to report the same. In these cases, I'm thinking there is a lot of "we need to 'do' American history stuff on vacation" going on, with deliberate choices to visit things like the monuments of DC, Independence Hall, and Boston's Freedom Trail. Natural History Museums Similar to history museums, natural history museums netted increased visits; parents are about 5 times more likely to report increased visits rather than fewer visits (46% vs. 9%). But again, that overall result masks nuance: families with very young children were only 2.5 times more likely to increase than decrease visits, while parents of elementary-schoolers were 8 times more likely. By middle school, however, there is a slight pull back from natural history museums. Science Centers No surprise, science centers are the epicenter of museum engagement for families. A whopping 77% of parents reported increase visitation versus only 4% visiting less (a factor of 21 times, by the way). Similar to natural history museums, elementary-age families were the most likely to report increased visitation, but families of both younger and older children were on their heels. Caveat Reminder This work only shows the pattern of attendance, the more/same/less/I don't visit patterns. That tells us a lot about what museums are perceived to be appealing for what ages of children, and if it affects museum-goer choices (it does … a lot!). But it doesn't tell us how often. Thus, looking at this data it would be easy to assume that families with tweens and teens visit science centers just as much as parents of elementary schoolers, but we all know that isn't true. Instead, it tells us that parents of tweens and teens are visiting science centers (and other museum types) more often than they did 15 or so years ago, before children. That's a different thing, which brings us too … Young Adult Insights This data set actually tells us a great deal about young adult museum attendance too. While the news here isn't great for art museums and family engagement, it is pretty good news in terms of engagement of younger adults without children. That is, they do relatively well with that audience before children, so they have farther to fall. In contrast, science centers clearly do extremely well with families, but the data set also implies that few young adults were visiting before children. They essentially had nowhere to go but up. Results were more mixed for the other museum types. So, the pattern of attendance tells us a great deal about what is considered age-appropriate and how attendance changes. How often families visit, however, has a lot to do with leisure time, parental relaxation rates, and what I am calling the pain/pleasure index. We'll look at those next. Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field? If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum. |
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