Understanding your visitors
Museums and galleries exist for public benefit. Having a sound understanding of the audience you are serving and what they want will enable you to be more effective in both creating and delivering your services.
What do you need to know?
It is useful to gather a range of information about your visitors. This will enable you to build up a picture of trends in visiting and service use, as well as feedback on the detail of service provision. The type of information you gather might include:
· Visitor numbers
· Demographic information such as visitors’ ages and nationality
· Where your visitors are coming from and why
· What your visitors enjoy/like the most about your museum
The methods you will use to gather this information will vary, but might include a door or ticket count, visitor questionnaires, event or exhibition feedback forms or meetings with focus groups. You can find more information on how to gather information on the Visitor Studies Group website and learn more about why it is important in the Listening to Your Visitors Toolkit. You can also find sample visitor survey questions, based on the experiences of our members, in the column to the right of this page.
To benefit from the experience of museums who have undertaken extensive research into visitor patterns and visitor needs go to the Victoria and and Albert Museum website, Natural History Museum website and the Culture Sport Glasgow website. All have useful information that can help put your own visitor information and data collection methods in context.
Next, find out How to use the information you gather.