Museums and teenagers don’t mix – that’s the received wisdom. But it’s also borne out by visitor numbers showing that very few 13- to 18-year-olds visit museums except with schools, family groups or on designated programmes.
If museums want to attract more teenagers, they need to look at how they are communicating with the age group and why they are failing to make them feel comfortable.
“Teenagers want to do three things,” says Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, an organisation that promotes family-friendly policies in museums and galleries.
“They want to sit in a comfy seat, they want to use their mobiles and they want to chat. When was the last time you were in a museum or gallery that let you do any one of these?”
Teenagers will stay away until museums accept what they want, Birkett says. “A lot of museums don’t allow unaccompanied under- 16s in, yet many also charge them as adults from 12,” she adds. “They haven’t even worked out at the most basic level who teenagers are.”
Birkett points out that although museums say they attract plenty of teenage visitors, these tend to be invited groups, in which they can be controlled.
“They are still a bit terrified of uninvited teenagers, and there have been cases where they’ve been asked to leave. This unwelcome message extends to civic spaces outside museums and galleries,” says Birkett, who is working on a video project with teenagers in which museum and gallery visits are filmed from their perspective.
Larger national museums tend to attract more teenagers, partly because they are free. Teenagers may also have been taken to places such as the Natural History Museum and Science Museum when they were younger.
But Claire Benjamin, head of communities at National Museums Liverpool (NML), says it’s not about resources. “It depends entirely on the culture of the museum, from the curatorial team making content relevant, to the staff’s initial response when teenagers step through the door,” she says.
“You have to provide a welcoming space, and train your staff so that they don’t automatically assume that the teenagers milling around in hoodies are ‘out to cause trouble’.”
Benjamin accepts that some of NML’s seven venues are more family friendly than others, and that there is a direct link between this and the number of teenagers that visit.
“It goes with the territory,” she says. “If they see it as a safe place to hang out on a Saturday afternoon, they might also go and see a space show at the planetarium or visit the aquarium.”
NML’s Youth Arts Programme has been running for five years, and having a dedicated project worker has made all the difference, says Benjamin. “We’ve had a demonstrable increase in visits at the International Slavery Museum, for example, both through school visits and outside programming.”
Reaching out
Reaching High is a project to encourage 15- to 18-year-old African-Caribbean boys who are at risk of dropping out of school to visit the museum.
The boys meet on Saturdays at the slavery museum and have been doing a project on the origins of urban music. Benjamin says they have learned about their own musical heritage and Liverpool’s part in the legacy of the slave trade. Their voices will be represented in the permanent collection with the tracks they’ve recorded.
One of the boys says: “The museum tour was interesting because you can’t just look at things, you’ve got to find out detailed information below the surface. I hadn’t done that before.”
Another participant had visited before but was surprised by how much he had missed. “We learnt capoeira [an African-Brazilian art form] and I’ve never done that before,” he says. “We learnt about the instruments – we got to play one of them – and about the history of music. It was nice to know where it has come from and how it evolved.”
There is no great mystery about why teenagers don’t visit museums, says cultural consultant Emma Courtney. “The most common word that comes up when I conduct surveys is ‘boring’. Teenagers enjoy participatory visits, where they get to fire a gun or climb a wall.”
But she says it’s possible for museums, even small ones, to find ways to make collections relevant. “They can make simple changes, such as allowing teenagers to handle objects, and recognising that they have short attention spans and need information in short bursts.”
Museums are competing against computer games and fast communications technology and need to keep their websites updated, and to make use of social networking sites.
Having explicit instructions on how to get to the museum sounds basic, but it’s something many museums don’t do well, says Courtney: “Don’t just put the address. Tell them what number bus to get and exactly where to get off.”
Courtney suggests advocacy and youth forums to discover directly what teenagers want. “There are many marketing and business approaches that can be applied in the cultural sector that even small regional museums can embrace,” she says.
Alison Baverstock, an academic and author of a book on parenting teenagers, thinks museums need to look at how other sectors build longer-term relationships with teenagers.
She has organised a session on the subject at the Museums Association conference (4-6 October, Manchester). Speakers include education and youth workers from the Ramblers; the Reading Agency, a charity that encourages people to read more; and Theatre Clwyd. Each organisation has devised innovative ways to engage teenagers.
“Museum marketing tends to be short term and based on exhibitions,” says Baverstock. “They need to move on to relationship marketing, which looks at the marketing methods teenagers are familiar with, and presenting it as a choice of how they spend their money.”
These could include vouchers, discounts and two-for-one offers like those used by mobile-phone companies to give away cinema tickets. “For teenagers, the shop and cafe tend to set the tone for the rest of the experience,” says Baverstock.
“If the shop has nothing teenagers can afford, they are unlikely to progress to the collections. With the collections, teenagers like to see things that cost a lot or are topical, so bring out your best. Let them see the treasures – not the fourth best – and make the unwrapping into an exciting ritual.”
Despite the success of last year’s Banksy v Bristol Museum, Tim Corum, the museum’s deputy director, says it is making a connection, not just the number of visitors, that is vital.
“It’s how you engage with the success that’s important,” says Corum. “We talk a lot about democratising museums, but I’d never felt the excitement and sense of empowerment that the Banksy exhibition brought.
“The glamour and celebrity were vital but, more importantly, people love making connections and the exhibition gave them an event to coalesce around.”
Young at art
About a third of the 308,000 visitors were under 25 years old and many of were unaccompanied teenagers. Corum says: “We used the comment books and forums to analyse the responses of visitors, and a consistent strand was that people loved the idea of the museum being ‘taken over’. It’s more than people feeling entitled to have a view; they were talking about what they would have done themselves.
“The web traffic tells you a lot. People were talking about the exhibition on Facebook, Flickr, blogs and forums for street art, for example, and they were engaging with the museum in a way that they haven’t done before, sharing ideas and experiences related to the show. Our marketing department was tracking responses on the web and engaging in discussions and debates.”
Corum says their long-term aim was to try to increase their engagement with those under 25 years of age. “Banksy was a brilliant way to link into that aim and to look at how the museum could change. I’d like to think a lot of the teenagers would come back.”
He says it also changed how the staff think about the museum. “By offering the space up to Banksy, we gave the strong message that the museum is not a neutral space, but a contested space.
“This gives a greater sense of ownership to teenagers, in particular, because they don’t feel that it’s a neutral space, whatever curators or managers may think.”
Corum says the exhibition’s legacy was a greater understanding within the cultural sector of what museums can do. “If museums can develop thought-provoking programmes that continue once people are out of the building, that would be genuinely democraticising.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist.
Whatever! A Down-to-Earth Guide to Parenting Teenagers, by Alison Baverstock, is published by Piatkus Books.
ARTiculation is an arts prize awarded to sixth-form students for a 10-minute spoken presentation on an artwork of their choice.
Now in its fifth year, it is run by the Roche Court Educational Trust, based at the New Art Centre in Salisbury. Judges for the 2011 prize include Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; Jonathan Watkins, director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; and the artist Michael Craig-Martin.
Lucy Salisbury, head of outreach and access at the New Art Centre, set up the prize. She says the competitive element is less important than its nurturing and mentoring aspects. “Talking about art is a learnt skill, and ARTiculation helps entrants find the confidence and language to do this,” she says.
At first, the schools that entered were ones with a tradition of public speaking, whose pupils studied the history of art and visited galleries and museums, says Salisbury, but the range has broadened over the past few years.
“You don’t have to be studying art to enter,” she says. “The 2010 winner, Mollie Brooks-Crowley, from John Cleveland College in Hinckley, Leicestershire, was an English student who talked about Damien Hirst’s The Virgin Mother sculpture, which she had seen on a visit to Chatsworth House with her grandparents.”
Salisbury visits schools to talk about ARTiculation and aims to build relationships with more of them, using links with the education and outreach departments of institutions such as the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. A mentoring scheme has also been launched with Leeds Art Gallery to encourage schools that would not normally enter.
“It’s nerve-wracking to stand up and talk in front of the judging panel, but it’s a brilliant life skill and helps with interviews,” says Salisbury. “It benefits museums and galleries by encouraging more teenagers to visit.”
Milton Keynes Museum worked with Emma Courtney, a cultural consultant and director of Courtney Consulting, and 13- to 14-year-olds from Milton Keynes Academy, to try and find out why teenagers did not come to the museum. Courtney says many thought it was “boring”.
“They also said they didn’t know how to get to the museum, while some didn’t know Milton Keynes even had a museum,” she adds.
“Their perception was that museums are for young children or older people, with nothing of relevance to their age group.
“But on our first visit, the young people had great fun with the museum’s historic telephone collection. They also learned about traditional crafts such as blacksmithing, which was an important skill in what was once a rural area. They were amazed to discover that there are still blacksmiths around today.”
The teenagers created an online survey of their peers and presented their findings to museum staff. They were critical of the museum’s failure to communicate with young people, and the fact that the museum needed updating.
But they could see the positives and the potential. They are now creating a Facebook site for the museum. The participants receive a volunteering certificate as well as picking up marketing, research and business skills.
Courtney says that, to its credit, Milton Keynes Museum has embraced the project findings, which is not always easy for a small, regional museum. “It was a learning curve for us all,” she says. “I hope the museum can apply some of the commercial methods to audience building, which are lacking in the cultural sector.”
