Day 1 of Visitor Studies Association Conference

I’m in St. Paul, Minnesota for the 2024 Visitor Studies Association conference. It’s a conference for visitor studies professionals from all kinds of museums (science, children’s, art, history, zoos), mostly people who work on in-house evaluation teams, though there are consultants and I met some marketing folks, too.

I sat in three (!) sessions today about how to get evaluation to be more valued within the organization: one focused creating a visitor impact-focus, one on lessons learned from a professional development project, and one on the successes of creating a “metrics team”. Clearly it’s a top-of-mind area.

Here are some takeaways I had from the sessions on getting organizations to use evaluation and data more meaningfully:

• “Why should I care” is always an unspoken question. If you want people to care about evaluation (or anything), they have to see how it benefits them DIRECTLY. Not two steps or four steps, not some vague notion about how it improves their decision making, not an abstract notion of how it improves their skills. Change is hard. Inertia is strong. To get people to put in the time to learn something totally new and change the way they work, they have to feel some pain about the way it’s done currently.
• Personal connection matters. Trying to build trust when you want someone to change is much harder than building on existing trust. Build the trust when you don’t need it so it’s there when you do need it. Having pre-existing relationships with colleagues, where you’ve demonstrated that you value and care about them goes a long way.
• Make it easy, make it fun. Data visualization. Pithy, easy to remember phrases. Evocative stories about visitor experiences. Opportunities for staff to connect with one another. These are the things that will make incorporating a new process or new information much easier and help the new habits to stick.

I was blown away by the savvy change management process and emotional intelligence demonstrated by Roslyn Esperon and her “metrics team” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. In the final session I attended today, she described how she and her team systematically built a culture of using data within the museum over the past several years. They started with one spreadsheet measuring one aggregate number of participation. Now they have weekly, monthly, quarterly, and exhibition reports that she credits with improving strategy, decision-making, and staff morale.

Roslyn and her team slowly built up measurements and tools, ensuring each one was reliable and sustainable before adding another. They cheerfully “infiltrated” their work across the organization, demonstrating the value that data could hold in big and small ways until people in all departments saw that the visitor data they were providing was useful, powerful, understandable, and most importantly RELEVANT TO THEM and helped them do their jobs better. The process wasn’t without challenges, including keeping the initiative important amongst competing priorities, but it has truly changed the organization. It’s a worthy case study on many levels.

Meeting new colleagues and doing a deep dive into a different area of visitor/audience relationships is fascinating and I’m looking forward to the next two days.

Photo by me of the river and pathway in St. Paul