New Museum Metrics
Posted in Design, Individualism on 03. Jun, 2010
Andrew Taylor of the Artful Manager writes about an interesting toolkit for measuring success in theatres aside from the usual headcount and box office. Some interesting quotes from the handbook.
Every time [The Arts Council of England] give money to us, at the back of their minds they are rehearsing arguments about why it hasn’t gone to a hospital.
The problem with only assessing numbers is that you get funding bodies wanting to put on more theatre, rather than necessarily better theatre.
It is easy to relate these to the museum world. There are more cuts coming despite being “out” of the recession and the lure of the blockbuster exhibition remains. The handbook lays out some really good template surveys and methodologies that creates scores for:
- Concentration and Engagement
- Learning and Challenge
- Energy and Tension
- Personal Resonance and Emotional Connection
- Shared Experience and Atmosphere
There are a few things in the handbook which would need some translation to museums and some that just aren’t relevant. How much Tension is there likely to be in a museum experience? Well, that is if you didn’t work there. There’s a lot said about time passing, which makes sense for a theatrical performance and makes up the Concentration metric. How could this be framed for museums? “I saw a lot in my time there” doesn’t really offer much to measure. You’d think everyone would see a lot in a museum.
Instantly, I think there would need to be a Participation metric. Which brings up another issue to me. All this is done in the form of surveys. Participation, like engagement, could be argued that by filling out the form in the first place is a measurement.
Just how successful can carrying out surveys be? A museum audience would react differently to a theatre one, especially “after the event”. The museum goer is, in part, measuring themselves. The trick is to incorporate the metric-gathering into the experience.
What metrics would you want to see in a museum version of this toolkit? Sensory experience? Identity Building? Thematic Awareness?
It’s great to see a post about evaluation!
There are a lot of great resources out there specifically for evaluating museum exhibitions and programs. Judy Diamond wrote a practical book on the subject, and informalscience.org is a wealth of examples and information, just to name a few.
From my experience, visitors are usually more than happy to fill out a short post-visit survey about their experiences and what they saw. It’s important to craft questions that are not test-like, i.e. focused less on content and more on personal reactions. Writing, editing and pilot testing your questions can ensure that you get the information you want, and need, which can give you data that is measurable and sound.
I would like to see more evaluations focused on individual motivations for visiting, i.e. why did you come to the museum/this exhibition? I would also like more museums to take front-end evaluation and planning more seriously; too often an exhibition is developed and built without any thought of what the museum is trying to accomplish. This kind of foundational planning leads to cohesive exhibitions with a clear narrative for the visitor to follow, which in turn helps the visitor retain more information (which is what we’re about, right?).