This part of the book is focusing on developing the visitor experience; in other words, assessing current performance, identifying ways of improvement and managing your teams and your resources to get you there. The first step of this undertaking has to be measuring the visitor experience you are delivering now. This chapter discusses some of the methods that might be used to gain such a measurement, and how the data you gather can be used to inform the way forward.

Museum evaluation

Measuring the quality of visitor experience is one part of the much bigger topic of museum evaluation, an area of research that has grown considerably in the last 20 years. In some cases, this has been driven by the requirements of funders such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund as they ensure that key goals are being met, but also by our increasing desire as museum profes - sionals to ensure we are staying relevant to our audiences’ needs. This includes measuring the visitor experience.

If you want to learn about museum evaluation more broadly, the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS) and The Audience Agency (2021a) all have great free online resources. You can find links at the end of the book. For now, because museum evaluation is such a broad topic and we will be focusing on a relatively narrow section of it here, I thought it would be useful to provide a quick description of some of the terms commonly used:

• • Primary research: This is direct research, straight from visitors to you.

• • Secondary research: This is often desk-based research, using secondary sources such as historic evaluation data.

• • Quantitative research: This type of research looks for data that can be expressed in numbers. It is great for measuring how many, or how much, but less good at telling us how or why.

• • Qualitative research: Rather than focusing on numbers, this type of research ‘uses broader questions and themes and patterns’ (Parsons, 2020, 4). This data is better at answering the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions.

• • Segmentation: Segmentation seeks to understand visitor behaviour by categorising people into groups based on similar characteristics.