Guide: visitor engagement

Many cultural organisations grapple with how to transform established business methods in ways that meet visitors’ evolving engagement expectations.

In order to do this effectively they should focus on building customer engagement, increasing revenue and reiterating the organisation’s mission and values.   

 

Yet many museums of all shapes and sizes are resistant to taking a fundamental first step, which is to collect visitor information. Such reluctance was quite understandable in a time when collecting information meant handing over a clipboard and pen to the visitor and waiting as they filled out a form.

This type of scenario looms large in the memories of museum staff, and many are still strongly opposed to collecting information from customers. But there are real benefits to fully knowing your customers, even if that just means having their first names and email addresses.

 

Properly contextualising the importance of mobile phones and emails is a challenge for every sector. What was your first email address? Do you even remember? It might have been a cute representation of interests that probably obscured your identity. Remember when online privacy was an expectation instead of an oxymoron? The pendulum has swung far indeed.

Museums are very good at taking a long view, and often their collections represent the combined history of earth and its inhabitants, or specific periods of art. Yet the ability for every visitor to read email on their personal smartphone has made each individual a powerful, unique entity that expects communication to be directed specifically to them. Your core visitors – can you imagine what access you’d have to them if you truly knew who they were?

 

What you can do now Replace a portion of free programming with registration-required programming. Why do it? Two reasons. First, registration-required programming activates the unsung hero of added value. Customers know they will have a seat waiting for them at their favourite programmes.

Instead of having to arrive 90 minutes early for a lecture to ensure a good seat, why not reserve their seat and let them come inside 30 minutes in advance to claim it? Second, in order for them to claim that seat, you’ll need to have their names and contact information. This is a win for both the museum and visitor.

 

Long-term opportunity Amplify the indispensable emotional satisfaction you provide your core visitors. Some segments of your customer base want to know each other, and there is some social interaction happening in your galleries already.

As you collect the names of visitors, you can begin to intentionally build your community of like-minded culture lovers. Bringing people together to learn and discover and create relationships with each other around your offerings can advance your mission exponentially.This might not happen tomorrow but it will be sooner than you think.

 
Museums are organic, with changing temporary and special exhibition offerings that tempt and entice visitors to explore. Yet, too often museums are viewed as “been there, done that” kind of experience. We unintentionally reinforce this thinking by treating our visitors impersonally, or worse, as total unknowns when they come back for another visit.

 

What you can do now Collect contact information via flexible workflows based on the volume of visitors. If there is no line, collect as much information as the patient visitor is willing to offer when being gently persuaded. They’ve likely given their email address to a retailer, so why not to your fine establishment?

Are you afraid the line will go crazy while your visitor assistant is typing in an email address? Now, if it is the busiest day of the year, you could still choose as you do today to “load and go” and sell admission without capturing any information. This final, flexible workflow is very hard to stomach, as I’d call that the “wish-we-knew-you” list, and in the long run, you might as well be still working from illegible clipboards.

 

Long-term opportunity Consider obvious mechanisms for communicating the value to the visitor for being known, and make sure that the marketing and visitor services departments are on the same page about it. From the moment the visitor arrives, they should want to come back.

Having their information makes their next visit easier for them – skip the line next time! Don’t let insidious “been there, done that” thinking keep you continually in new visitor acquisition mode.

 

Technology has come a long way since clipboards. The single best way to limit the real damage of being unable to collect visitor information efficiently is to be able to collect visitor information efficiently.

Make sure your visitor engagement technology supports the long-term ambitions of your institution. Having the data is the key to understanding your constituency’s behaviors and needs, and without it, you essentially resign yourself to a static future.

 

Your mission is likely a combination of desires – educate for the future, preserve the past, and connect memorably to visitors. A good start would be to know their names.

 

Erin Koppel is the director of Tessitura Network, which is a not-for-profit technology and services company that works with 550 cultural organisations in the UK and abroad to develop customer relationship management strategies.