M&G NSW talks Audience Research at MA National Conference

Lunching on the lawn at the 2012 MA Conference

I recently attended the Museums Australia national conference In Adelaide and spoke about the State-wide NSW public galleries audience evaluation study Guess Who’s Going to the Gallery. Though I have been talking about this project since 2008, every time I return to it I am reminded of how important it is as both a data set and a bench mark for gallery audiences in Australia. 

There were, of course, several other presentations in this session. Reagan Forrest & Jenny Parsons talked about a project using skills of corporate volunteers to track the pathways of audiences in the Aboriginal galleries of the South Australian Museum and how that data was interpreted and its results implemented. Gillian Savage from Environmetrics Pty Ltd spoke about a simple template for a short questionnaire on evaluating a program or event. Carolyn Meehan from Museums Victoria spoke about the need to share data on our audiences... and led by example. The final presentation from Jan Packer (University of Queensland) looked at evaluating audience experiences along 15 qualities.

The Guess Who’s Going to the Gallery: The NSW State Report can be found here.

Gillian and Reagan & Jenny’s presentation can be found here.

Following the session, I ran a workshop Getting to Know You on learning more about your audiences. Originally aimed at volunteer managed and run museums, it was clear from a little bit of audience research, that the people in this workshop were far from beginners. In many ways the workshop proved the point that knowing who you are talking to should absolutely frame the type of research you do and the way you go about it.

With this group, I spoke though some of the basic ideas behind why audience evaluation is of use as well as some resources available – with a more comprehensive list included in this post.

You can download the basics of the workshop Getting to Know You here

Finally you can always contact me at M&G NSW with any questions.

Michael Huxley