Evaluating and Responding to Our Visitors

For our March Roundtable, our group read Conny Graft’s 2007 History News article, “Listen, Evaluate, Respond! The Colonial Williamsburg Visitor Research Story.” Our conversation took some unpredicted turns, and hovered on the topics of relevancy and first person interpretation--both of which I’ll explore in greater depth in future blog posts. More generally, our group emerged impressed with Colonial Williamsburg’s strategic approach to visitor evaluation and curious to hear more about recent developments with their Revolutionary City program.

In deciding to undertake a comprehensive visitor study, an institution must first be willing to open itself up to criticism and then be willing to actually consider that visitor input when making future decisions. While I consider myself to be a strong advocate for visitor study and evaluation, I can certainly understand the very real hesitation some of us may feel before undertaking such a project. It’s never easy to hear from people that what you’re doing might not be having its intended effect and it’s even harder to hand over some level of control for future programming decisions to the visitors themselves.

I commend Colonial Williamsburg for facing those fears head on, and for then using that feedback to fundamentally alter their visitor experience. And I’d love to hear about how it’s going for them currently--in terms of visitation, visitor satisfaction, and new program development. So if you know of any recent articles, blog posts, or reports on CW, please pass them along.

In the end, I believe this kind of evaluation--and the self reflection that must follow--strengthens our institutions, ensuring that we can continue to preserve history for future generations to come.