Audience Development for beginners, or, A museum is only as boring as I make it

The off-season is a strange time, to be sure. I can't decide if I'm busy, or have too much time to kill. I'm sure that the fact that I'm not running around town buying program supplies or driving to the other museum for admin has added minutes (if not hours) to each day, but there's still stuff to do. It's just different stuff.

Sure, I've got some programs to plan and deliver. (Which reminds me that I need to call the psychic again for the seance. You'd think she'd know I was trying to reach her...) Anyway, now is the wonderful time for thinking. Yes; thinking. It's difficult to sit down and ponder the day away in a world where people seem to think that if you're not perpetually stressed out, you're not working hard enough, but we've got to do it.

In my field that means research. Yes, the boring, pouring over old ledgers and diaries kind, but also the new, and often daunting, idea of planning. Planning for the new year, planning for your winter intern (done! yay!), planning for... well, everything. The most important of which is how the #$^&@ to get more people to visit our museums. It also happens to be the most difficult.

I don't think people realize how much of a museum professional's time is spent trying to get them to our stupid little museums in the first place. By the time you're at my door I'm so happy that you made it that we'll foist a tour on you ("Please take the tour, sir. We've been waiting for you all day!") or I'll talk to you for 20 minutes about the garden that I'm failing miserably at maintaining. I suppose that's why I'm so welcoming to visitors; I'm really and truly glad they made it, and, goddammit, we worked hard to get them here.

I'm on a committee of the local museums group that's trying to develop a membership program for all of us (9 in total!). The main goal is to get the word out about the different museums since we're all pretty small and have a tough time competing with the nationals. It's hard to get us to agree on some things, but we all agree that we need more visitors and that our target audiences are young families. Easy. Right?

We have more kids programs, special events, family campfires, crafts... all things for the families. The catch is; we all do it. All nine of us. It works. Families like what we do. It's a great idea.

Last week (what a coincidence), I was asked to answer some questions about my museum by our Audience Development Officer, who's working on our new Audience Development Plan for the three sister museums. Things like, "Describe the ideal visitor experience", "What brings visitors to your museum for the first time?" and "What drives a visitor to return to your museum?" are really quite hard-hitting. I mean, I should know the answer to all these questions, shouldn't I?

It took a while, and a lot of rambling, to get something out of me, but in the end it all ended up with an answer that can be summed up as, "For those that are aware that the museum exists, the experience is boring to most people, but they like our programs, although most don't like the fact that we're so far out of town, and we're focusing our efforts on families because we can cater to them the easiest."

Actually, I didn't realize that's what I was saying between the lines until just now and I feel a bit ill. But it's true.

We cater to families because that's the easiest. Well, and we feel that there's still room to grow in those markets.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with catering to families with our programming. Nothing at all. We have lots of visitor-families and they love us; that's great. But if we (myself and my sister museums) are catering to families, and the other six small similar museums in the city are catering to families... doesn't that mean that we're stealing each other's business?

More importantly, doesn't that make us boring?

I read something the other night in Seth Godin's Free Prize Inside that struck me. Godin also wrote The Purple Cow, and both are business marketing books that are fun to read and talk about how to make your business grow by not playing it safe and by finding a way for your product or business to "be remarkable" compared to the competition. Free Prize Inside talks specifically about the "soft innovation", the little extra that makes people buy your product or experience above everyone else's. Hence, "free prize inside".

The passage I read is the following one:
"Go find some people who hate what you've got and who hate what your competitors have but still have a problem they want solved. These are the folks who want the free prize."

In museums, we never even think of trying for the people who "hate what [we've] got". Which, let's be honest, is a lot of people. (My uncle was lecturing me on the sanitization of history by museums and historic sites at Thanksgiving, which led to a spirited debate with yours truly.) Perhaps our audience development should target these groups, or at least offer something that they're looking for. But then, that's the problem, isn't it? What are they looking for?

In the meantime, I'm going to keep on plugging away at my programming for families. But I'm not going to stop thinking about the free prize.

Do you think milk and cookies would entice more visitors?

You know, I'm actually serious.