In talking with colleagues in the Visitor Experience world, both in general and in researching this book, I have run into a common challenge: common enough to focus a chapter on it here. This section of the book is all about developing the visitor experience: setting new goals and taking your operation forward to achieve them. To do that, it's really important that within our organisations we act as effective advocates for the visitor experience, working alongside colleagues in other departments to deliver visitor-centred improvements.

And yet this isn't always as simple as it sounds. Through conversations with others and my own experience, I know that there can often be barriers to effective advocacy. In this chapter, we’ll look at some of these barriers and explore examples of best practice from across the sector to learn how to overcome them.

Barriers to effective advocacy

One of the most common barriers to visitor experience advocacy is the positioning of the responsible department within the organisation. The name given to what I would call the Visitor Experience team changes over time and across different organisations, as does where the department sits. I have seen it included as part of a wider Operations team, part of the Public Engagement team, part of the Learning team, part of the Marketing and Audience Development team, part of the Commercial team: the list is endless. You might think this doesn't matter: Visitor Experience teams have to work with everyone in the organisation to deliver the visitor offer, so what does it matter where they sit?

Actually, I’ve found that it really does make a difference. In small or big museums, having a senior champion of visitor experience, whether that's through management structure or through having a senior advocate at board level, will hugely impact how visitor-centric your organisation is, and how seriously the job of those in visitor-facing roles is taken. Job titles and organograms matter. If that sounds far-fetched, consider this example from someone I interviewed for this book (who I will keep anonymous for obvious reasons). This person told me the story of working in a large organisation where the operations team were called ‘custodians’, whilst other teams were known as the ‘professional’ staff. The professional staff even had a nickname for the staff on site: ‘donkeys’.