Making Your Visitor Your #1 Priority
One thing all children’s museum founders share is a deep desire for their children’s museum to be successful. But what does success look like? How you define success can be expansive. It can be about attendance numbers or favorability ratings. It can be about learning impacts or reaching audiences who are experiencing participation barriers. It can be about a healthy bottom line or about innovative earned income strategies. It can be about all the above -- but in a broader view of success, it’s important for any new children’s museum to achieve community-wide affirmation. But where does that affirmation come from?
There are dozens of metrics that can analyze a new museum’s success, but the longer I’ve worked in the children’s museum field, the clearer it is that visitor experience is the foundational measure of success for a new children’s museum. Not to diminish other areas of focus for measurement (in fact, evaluation should be central to your museum’s operations), but ultimately a new children’s museum will be judged by what its visitors experience, what they perceive, and what they share with others. Community-wide assessment of a new children’s museum’s success comes out of the perceptions of those who visit and even those who hear about it secondhand.
These perceptions of success (or lack of success), while formed individually, pile up into a community-wide consensus of your children’s museum’s value. It’s the visitor’s own points-of-contacts, or “touchpoints,” with any aspect of your museum, reinforced by what they hear and take in from friends and community.
A touchpoint happens when a potential visitor looks for a program start-time on your website or scrolls through a Facebook post. It happens when they navigate your parking lot and when shepherding their children through your front doors. It happens when a staff member provides a bandage for a bonked head and fills out an incident report. It happens when children come together for an amazing play experience with the loose parts you intentionally selected through iterative prototyping. It’s these direct and indirect touchpoints that make up a visitor’s experience, the impressions these experiences create, and the sharing of their perceptions with others, that determine whether or not your museum is viewed positively and talked about as a success.
To go a little deeper about the perceptions of success, try thinking about another museum or family-focused destination you’ve visited. What immediately comes to mind? Most likely, your brain quickly scans its memory bank and pulls together an immediate perception that can range from broad feelings like:
We love that place
The only place my kids agree on
Our go-to Tuesday morning playdate
to reactions from specific past experiences like:
Last time we didn’t get past the maker shop because the kids were so into it
We had a major melt-down, but the staff were so helpful
My neighbor always takes her kids to Lauren’s maker program. They won’t miss it.
Conversely, perhaps this exercise stirs up negative perceptions about your experiences such as:
We just don’t enjoy ourselves there
We want to love it, but it feels tired
It could be so much more, but staff doesn’t seem to care
or specific negative experiences like:
Our favorite exhibit was closed, and it didn’t say so on the website
The bathrooms were stinky and dirty
Staff were standing around and couldn’t answer our questions
I would be hard-pressed to tally up all of the touchpoints that could make or break the visitor experience. From helpful information on your website, to navigable parking and entry, to well-planned and maintained exhibits, to plenty of materials in your maker shop, to engaged staff armed with first aid and comforting words, children’s museums have many opportunities to help your visitors leave with positive impressions from successful experiences.
I recently started working with a newly opened children’s museum on the process of moving visitor experience to the center of its staff training plan. While they opened to rave reviews, they were starting to see some staff practices set-in that could cause negative touchpoints. Used materials were frequently left on activity tables, some phone calls went unanswered, the website wasn’t always updated, staff were unaware of the weekend program schedule, and so on. Certainly it’s not easy for any emerging children’s museum to go from starting-up to full-on operations. Even with practicing and piloting daily operations prior to grand opening, there are too many visitor touchpoints for all staff to be fully prepared for the range of interactions and responses.
That is why we’re crafting a staff training plan that places visitor experience at the center of the museum’s operations by exploring staff’s role in managing touchpoints. One big goal is to help staff develop the practices and disposition to learn from the visitor touchpoints that they are part of, or that they observe. We envision a training protocol that gives staff the agency to develop their own view of visitor experience and their individual role in managing touchpoints. It’s a practice with space for reflection, sharing, and learning together. We’ll aim to help staff make the connection that their day-to-day and moment-to-moment interactions and responses create the impressions that culminate in the community’s shared view of the children museum. In the long run, we hope all staff will see visitor experience as central to their work, as they embrace a consistent practice of learning from touchpoints, building-up our continually expanding view of visitor experience.
Be sure to check back for more articles on visitor experience staff training as we build-out this brand new training process.
