Who’s Coming? A New Free Toolkit for Respectful Audience Surveying

Michaela Clark-Nagaoka surveying visitors at a MAH event.

Note: this is cross-posted on OF/BY/FOR ALL, where you can find more tools and stories for building more inclusive organizations. 

If you want to involve new people at your organization, you need to know who is coming - and who isn’t. Today, OF/BY/FOR ALL is introducing a new free resource - a guide to creating and implementing demographic audience surveys that are accurate, respectful, and useful.

I remember the first time I understood how powerful it was to have demographic data about our participants. At the time, I was leading the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We were three years into a dramatic transformation to welcome new people in new ways. For my first three years, we got a sense of who was and wasn’t involved based on observation and gut instinct. We tried things. We checked out the crowd. We noticed if people were younger or older, more or less racially diverse.

But after three years of ad hoc observation, we were hungry for hard data. We realized our gut instincts could only take us so far. There was a lot we couldn’t see - like economic class and sexual orientation. And there was a lot we were assuming - about race, gender, and age. We decided to make a commitment to collecting better data about who was and wasn’t coming.

We discovered that was not an easy thing to do. We talked to colleagues in other institutions who were struggling with the same questions. No one had a playbook of answers. We ended up working with two sets of consultants, funded by two different foundations, for over a year. Those expert researchers taught us how to conduct truly random surveys, how to train our team, how to ask sensitive questions in a respectful manner, and how to analyze the results. The outcome was a simple, powerful protocol... but our process in getting there was anything but simple.

That’s why we decided, as part of our first year of work with OF/BY/FOR ALL, to demystify audience surveying with The Who’s Coming toolkit. We’ve teamed up with Slover Linett Audience Research - with generous support from the James and John L. Knight Foundation - to write this toolkit. We wrote it for people like us: busy professionals who want to do a better job capturing and analyzing demographic audience data. In this toolkit, you’ll find step-by-step tools to help you write a survey, share it with a truly random slice of your audience, and analyze the results. You don’t need funding or a consultant to get started collecting data. You can do it yourself, with your staff and volunteers - and this toolkit.

In my experience, collecting good demographic data can help you smash stereotypes. It can help you make smarter strategic decisions and better programs. As one small example, in our very first round of data collection at the MAH, we learned that the audience coming to monthly free First Friday events was wealthier, whiter, and older than the audience for ticketed Third Friday festivals. This finding fundamentally shifted our perception of who attends paid and free programs. It made us ask why, dig deeper, and understand a lot more about what makes a program welcoming to whom.

The Who’s Coming toolkit has two parts. The first section tackles HOW to design and implement random audience surveys. The second section tackles WHAT to ask. While both parts are rooted in practitioner and expert experience, the WHAT will keep evolving as our collective understanding of identity changes. We wrote this toolkit from a US-centered perspective, and we know some of the demographic terms might be different in other countries. If you have questions or suggestions to make the toolkit more inclusive, please let us know.

Until then, I hope you’ll read it, share it, and most of all, USE IT. You are free to download, share, excerpt, and use this toolkit however you want. And if you do use it, we’d love to hear how it goes for you and what you learn. What gets measured gets done. When you measure demographic data, it accelerates your ability to make positive, inclusive change.

A Long Interview as I say Goodbye to the MAH (and Thoughts on the Privilege of Leading Change)

Some of our courageous team. We are strong together.

I'm in my final week at the MAH. It's everything I hoped and feared: sweet, exciting, sad, poignant, and full of delicious treats and surprises from my loving, zany colleagues.

Geoffrey Dunn, a fabulous writer and collaborator, just published a big cover interview with me in our local weekly, the Good Times. We talked Abbott Square, community issue exhibitions, surfing, and the beauty and struggle of community-driven change. If you're curious to hear more about what I'm most proud of in my eight years at the MAH, I hope you'll check it out.

I was proud to work with amazing colleagues to lead major change at the museum. We made it a more inclusive, relevant, and successful place. It was not easy. But it was needed. And it was worth it.

My favorite question Geoffrey asked me was about engaging with people who were critical of the transformation of the MAH. Here's his question and my full answer (which was edited down for length in the published article).

Geoffrey wrote: 
Some of the changes you imposed on the museum, including Abbott Square, generated criticism, mostly from some of the old guard types who wanted more traditional explorations of art and history.

Here's my full response:
Not everyone liked how we, and I, led the MAH. But as a leader, I have to weigh those small number of critical voices against the hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic people who got newly involved - including many who had never felt welcome in a museum before. For every critic, there were literally a thousand new people telling us how grateful they were for the changes.

In a lot of ways, I’m embarrassed I spent as much emotional energy on those critics as I did. I had to remind myself that every minute I spent worrying about someone who didn’t like what we were doing - someone who was never going to like what we were doing! - was a minute I wasn’t spending on someone who could and would benefit from being involved. Over time, I learned to bless and release those critics, so I could focus on the people who were ready to engage.

When I think of the loudest critics of our work, I think of people who wanted the MAH to be a more exclusive, elitist, academic place. I think that’s the wrong vision for a public institution. I think it’s the wrong vision for Santa Cruz. For a museum to survive and thrive today, it must be relevant and meaningful for many people from many backgrounds. It must sway to the pulse of the cultural community in which it resides. It must be radically inclusive, constantly working to invite new people to connect for new reasons. That’s what we tried to do at the MAH.

And these changes were not just my doing. The board hired me with the specific mandate to make the MAH “a thriving, central gathering place.” I hired community organizers and creative convenors. We made it our mission to open the museum up. To younger people. To Latinx people. To people who were unsure if their story, their art, their voice mattered in our community. We made the MAH a museum of “and” - art AND history, participation AND contemplation, loud Friday nights and quiet Tuesday afternoons. The friction, the hybridity, different people from different walks of life colliding through art and history and public life - that’s what building a more connected community is all about.

People often are afraid to lead change because they know that some will resist that change. That’s true. But it’s also true that if you are changing an organization to be more inclusive and relevant, many, many people will fall in love with the change. They will thank you for the change. They will push you to keep changing. I don’t see leading change as hard or painful. I see it as a great privilege and I feel lucky to do it.

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To all the inclusive changemakers out there: I honor your courage. I honor your struggle. It's worth it.