Those of you who know me, know that I have a soft spot in my heart for Colonial Williamsburg due to my fabulous four years as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. And in my last post you may have read my kudos to CW for providing a model of visitor evaluation from which all of us in the historic site field could learn.
But, I’m left to wonder how those of us at smaller institutions can realistically undertake similar evaluation projects. The visitor study discussed in Conny Graft’s 2007 article, “Listen, Evaluate, Respond!” included ten-months of in-home interviews, guest journaling, employee surveys, literature reviews, and e-mail satisfaction surveys. Meanwhile, here at Dumbarton House, our passionate, experienced, and overworked 8-person full-time staff struggles to find the time to routinely collate and analyze simple comment cards. If it’s difficult for us to consistently gather visitor feedback, I can only imagine how daunting the prospect must be to institutions with even fewer paid staff.
I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop on visitor evaluation led by Graft in November at AASLH’s intensive professional development program, the Seminar for Historical Administration. At that workshop, Graft stressed that visitor studies could be undertaken at institutions of any size and any budget. While I left the workshop energized, I’ve emerged from 5 months back in the trenches a bit skeptical.
Though skeptical, I’m also more convinced than ever that evaluation is critical to our success as an institution. So, I’m seeking out other models--sites that have undergone meaningful visitor studies and worked to successfully integrate evaluation into their practice, without the benefit of a professional evaluator on staff.
In the meantime, Dumbarton House is moving forward and learning along the way, with our education and marketing staff conducting online surveys of visitors and community members as part of our interpretive planning process. Who knows? Maybe our own experience will prove useful to other small & medium sized historic institutions looking for a realistic way to gather visitor feedback with limited staffing and limited budgets.
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Thanks Karen! Please continue to share your findings! There have to be many ways out there that small museums like us are effectively designing, implementing, and evaluating our visitor's experiences. We have a small staff as well (5 full time, 1 part time). We consistently distribute program evaluation forms, but do not formally evaluate our general visitors in our galleries. I look forward to reading other's comments and your future posts.
ReplyDeleteI have a hunch that small museums get visitors who are reasonably sophisticated and polite. Small museums, I would guess, are sought out by the guest who has read or been told about the site; occasionally the visitor is just "passing by." If I am right about those characteristics, it follows that he is unlikely to say anything strongly negative on a survey form. What if he were just asked, not to rate his experience, but "What could we have done better?" or "what do you wish we had done that we didn't?"
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect of the visitor experience I wonder about concerns the guided versus self-guided tour. What if DH offered a visitor, who had just completed a self-guided tour, a complimentary guided tour (or perhaps only a guided "mini-tour" of two rooms, for example), with the understanding he would provided feeddback?
Of course, none of this would yield statistically defensible material, but it might be interesting.
Thanks for the comments! We will certainly share some of our DH findings from our studies here on our blog over time. And I hope ya'all will chime in with other studies that might be relevant to our work.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which--Reach Advisors is posting their survey findings (of over 40,000 museum goers) on their blog http://reachadvisors.typepad.com/
Their posts are engaging and relevant--even to us small sites!