What is the Value of Audience Research?

My colleague recently asked for suggestions on resources to share with a client about audience research. We had no shortage of suggestions for resources about conducting audience research, but we lacked resources about the value of audience research for museum practitioners. 

Why? Do we just assume that audience research has value to museum practitioners, so it needs no justification?

If so, that is all the more reason to unpack the question: What is the value of audience research? Because you know what happens when we ass-u-me (wink😉).

What is audience research?

Audience research is a research approach that seeks to understand people from a current or desired audience. We advocate using audience research to discover the motivations, values, and lived experiences of audiences (in addition to relevant demographic and socio-economic information) to help museums form relationships with people. 

There are many methods that can be used for audience research. Surveys are one common method to explore audiences broadly, such as coming to an understanding of current walk-in visitors or seasonal variations in audiences. Focus groups are another common method to understand specific audience segments deeply (e.g., history or social studies teachers for grades 6-8). However, there are many other methods that can be used for audience research, such as interviews, diary studies, and more!

What is the value of audience research?

The value of audience research is to help museums form relationships with people. Audience research begins with collecting information to understand. But ultimately, we want understanding to be a catalyst for museum staff to build empathy with people that then supports museum staff to form or maintain relationships with audiences. Let’s break these parts down.

Understand

The title of a Wallace Foundation report from 2015 succinctly pinpoints what audience research helps us do: Taking Out the Guesswork. Museum practitioners certainly know their audiences in some ways from their day-to-day work with people. But audience research—grounded in systematic approaches to research—can more fully help museum practitioners understand audiences either in terms of their breadth (i.e., the range of people who engage with online programs) or depth (i.e., motivations, interests, and barriers of individuals in your community that are underrepresented in your museum audience). Indeed, sometimes audience research does affirm what you may already know or assume, but again, let's take out the guesswork because you know what happens when we ass-u-me (wink, wink 😉).

Build empathy

If done well, audience research should help museum practitioners build empathy for current or desired audiences. As researchers, we want to ask important questions about audiences that will help museums do their work, as well as report information about audiences to museum practitioners in human-centered ways. We want museum practitioners to feel for audiences without becoming defensive or explaining away audiences’ feelings. In this way, we hope to be what museum audience researcher Marilyn Hood calls “change agents,” going a step beyond “visitor advocates.” In building empathy among museum practitioners for audiences, we believe we can motivate museums to truly center audiences, leading them to change their ways to be more inclusive and relevant.

Form or maintain relationships

Again, we view museum practitioners forming and maintaining relationships to be the ultimate goal of audience research. However, we do caution against conflating audience research with audience engagement. For us, audience engagement is the work a museum does (across all departments) to help people connect with their resources (collections, exhibitions, programs, etc.) in personally meaningful ways. Audience research might be embedded within or inform audience engagement, but audience research cannot stand in place of engagement. For more on this idea, check out these 2019 blog posts by Ed Rodley and Seema Rao, which are still very relevant regarding the museum field’s lack of clarity. 

When does audience research not fulfill its potential?

There are many ways audience research can fall short of its potential. Audience research won’t live up to its potential when:

• It only collects demographic information about audiences.

• It does not tell audiences’ stories in human-centered ways that support building empathy. 

• It only helps museum practitioners understand, without setting them up for action upon their learnings.

Furthermore, museum practitioners may not be prepared to make the most of audience research if:

• They cannot envision how audience information will help them in their day-to-day work (i.e., everything is nice but not necessary to know).

• They become defensive of the museum’s actions versus sitting with the audience’s feelings. 

• Their end goal is not relationship building, but something transactional and museum-centric.

Finally, I would argue that audience research fails to fulfill its potential when researchers and practitioners make assumptions about its value without clear intentions for how the research informs their work. Yes! I snuck in one last reminder about what happens when we ass-u-me (wink, wink, wink 😉).