Community-Engagement, Visitor-Centered, and Other Words

Written by Seema Rao

I've written about Community Engagement often on my old blog, Brilliant Idea Studio. Last March, I wrote up some general notes about community engagement based on a mind-map I did at a #MuseumNext talk.

Here is the gist of my remarks: Community Engagement is one of those terms that is tossed around in museums but can become encrusted with coded meaning. Often museums use the word community engagement to mean bringing in low-income people, with “community” being a coded term for underprivileged people. Sometimes community engagement might be used as the term for bringing in new audiences. Or, in an ideal situation, community engagement is a term for connecting people to your organization.

I bring this up because the interrelationship of humans and museums are the topics of this month. I wrote at the beginning of the month about human-centered museums. And, last week, I compiled the notes from the Western Museums Association conference about engagement broadly. This week, as I always do, I started a conversation on social to use as the basis of the month's summary post.

Kate Livingston brought up a great point. Often in these debates, the meaning of key terms get obfuscated. As such, people speak at cross purposes. She was talking about visitor-centered being misunderstood. So, this month, I thought I'd give you my definitions for the key ideas of the month. I'd love to hear your definitions:

Visitor-centered means centering your visitors in your work. When you keep them as the center of your planning and decision-making, you will make choices that work for your visitors. For me, centering visitors is different than being visitor-driven. The latter is like letting the two-year-old plan and make dinner; the former is making dinner the two-year-old will enjoy but that falls into your desires as a parent. 

Community Engagement (as I said above) is connecting people to your organization. These people can be local or national (virtually). They might be underserved or not. They might be of color or not. They might be marginalized or not.

Human-centered means understanding the humans in your museum, including staff, and designing for their needs.

Data-informed is a way of using data, often generated through visitor-actions to help you make decisions as you become more visitor-centered. (Unlike data-driven which is using data in lieu of other tools to make decisions).

Often visitor-center work also overlaps DEAI work. Those terms are also important to define. I am constantly revisiting how I define the terms.

Diversity is the inclusion of people who identify in different ways, including by race, gender, age, and class.

Inclusion is the practice of breaking/ transforming barriers to include everyone.

Access is creating affordances that help anyone participate in your organization.

Equity is developing methods, platforms, and systems that allow for the inclusion of diverse people into your organization.

In my mind, museums need to be human-centered, including being visitor-centered, which is accomplished by being data-informed. One of the processes by which museums enact their visitor-centered culture is through community engagement. And, community engagement is essential in making museums more equitable, i.e. places where diverse people feel included and find no barriers to access. 

What other terms are important as we think about community engagement, visitor-centered museums, and audiences? How do you define these terms?

Share here in the comments or on social.As always, tag me in your posts and shares so I can include you in my summary post at the end of the month (TW @artlust, Linkedin@seemarao, IG @_art_lust_)

Audience Engagement Conversation at Western Museums Association

The Western Museum Association was kind enough to invite me to speak on a panel about engagement at their annual meeting in Boise. I was joined by

• Scott Stulen, Director & President, Philbrook Museum of Art 
• Maren Dougherty, EVP, Communications and Visitor Experience, The Autry Museum of the American West
• Adam Rozan, Director of Programs & Audience Development, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
• Phillip Thompson, Executive Director/Board President, Idaho Black History Museum

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The panel included people from different types of museums (history and art), scales of organization, and people with different specialties. Despite these divergences, we found great convergence around the big issues in the field.

Phillip’s early remark about museums was an invocation for everyone. He noted that coming from technology and medicine, he wasn’t hampered by the norms of the field. As an outsider, he immediately saw that museums were operating “under a business model that doesn’t work.” He then went on to note that we run museums with the hopes of being supported by philanthropy, when in fact we could have a product that people want. However, in order to accomplish the former, museums would have to transform to be more consumer-driven.

I was struck also by Scott and Adam’s repeated notes about interrogating the sources of knowledge. Scott told a story about the edict to not step on the grass in his lovely Italianate gardens. When he investigated the source, he found the tradition was from a long-retired gardener. Rationally looking at the system caused him to make a different choice. He allowed people to walk on the grass and added tables to make the space inviting. While some long-time members of the community were unhappy with the change, scores of new people came in.

In many ways, the subtext of our whole panel was that change will mean your audience will be different, but that’s not bad. As I said last week, there are people out there who could like you. They don’t know what they’re missing. But you can feel their absence in your empty galleries. Often the loss of visitors is completely due to your structures. Adam told a touching story about his late father, who suffered from Alzheimer's. His mother, the caregiver, called potential outings to see if they had family restrooms. If they didn’t, she couldn’t visit. We are turning people away without even noticing.

Adam spoke about this issue of restrooms in part as a sign about bigger issues. Organizations are neither just leaders or staff, but an ecosystem of people working together. He related the theory of the Commander’s Intent, in which the end state needs to be in line with all operations, and everyone needs to be on board. Everyone needs to understand their part so they can make decisions from their roles. But, the organization also needs to put its money and effort behind this. The ship only works if supported and organized so that everyone can support each other.

We also have a culture of not treating the people who are coming right. Maren talked about the importance of including people at public events, even if they don’t go to the galleries. Bringing people in means often changing your idea of what an ideal visit looks like. She also noted it might mean finding ways to meet real needs. At her organization, she noted serving seniors was important, as this is rare in Los Angeles, but also serving families in an unstructured way. Rather than forcing people into the programs they wanted, they looked for what people wanted and solved for that. This often requires real problem-solving. Maren also got the largest “wow’s” from the audience when she talked about the issue of alcohol and museum programming. People are used to carrying around beverages; museums need to keep works safe and facilities clean. Their institution has started experimenting with giving out beverages at parties in branded adult sippy cups that visitors can take into the museum’s theater.

Another big topic was the issue of demonstrating your desire to change. Phillip and Scott spoke about the transformations of procedures to enable change. Phillip, for example, wanted more college students as he is on a college campus, so he put a college student on the board. Adam also talked about leading change in his teams often by rethinking work with them.

Making change is not without stress. And, in many of our prep conversations, we talked about the real challenge of changing human systems. But at the same time, almost every museum professional I’ve spoken to speaks of how visitors don’t feel welcome. It feels like the data is pretty damning. We need to change.

What are your thoughts on audience engagement and change? Is there a line in the sand for the field in terms of how visitor-centered we should be? Is there a bad side to being visitor-centered? What's the hard part of being visitor-centered?

Share here in the comments or on social.
As always, tag me in your posts and shares so I can include you in my summary post at the end of the month (@artlust, @seemarao, @_art_lust_)

Audience-Engagement Successes and Failures

Author: Seema Rao

This week I’m talking about being human-centered. I’m including some failures. Why? Well, exposure of failures helps us learn and helps us lead. As a leader, sharing failures helps normalize fallibility. As a person, it reminds you are human, and that’s good. Everyone in this field is human and as such fallible. If aren’t failing, you are either deluded, blind, or failing so hard you’re blinded and deluded by your work. (I will say that the two programs I will mention occurred fifteen years ago, and many jobs ago. I have had more recent failures, I assure you. But there is one caveat with sharing failures. They are rarely just your fault. So, make sure to be transparent with others involved before sharing.)

Audience-centered for me is a subset of human-centered. Audiences are a portion of the humans in the museum ecosystem. As first-time parents, they are the focus of most attention, almost to a fault. They are certainly an important raison d’etre of our field, though not the only one. The reason I think of a museum as human-centered is that to become audience-centered your organization has to center people. You have to get through the feels. You have to get at the motivations. As a collective, the staff needs to grow emotional awareness and empathy for others. Without an internal understanding of humanity, it’s hard to be audience-centered.

Practically, being audience-centered touches every aspect of staff work. If the decision-making factor to be what is best for your audience, your choices change. Signage goes from subtle enough to be hidden to useful to visitors. Labels go from ideal for my scholarly friends to legible to broad audiences. Gallery Talks become conversations instead of lectures (well, for some audiences).

The clarity of being audience-centered can be transformative and also daunting. Most of our common practices have been related to audiences, but not centered on audiences. We did what we could to foster audiences who thought like us. Centering audiences more broadly means hearing people who aren’t like us. People will not like you. Some people will not ever like you. But there are also some people who might like you if they get to know you. That’s who you are going to win when you become audience-centered.
Becoming whole audience-centered is a bit like learning to make friends once you mature. In middle school, you’re willing to change to make friends. In high school, you might refuse to bend at all for potential friends. As adult, you get it’s a give and take, a mutual growth. Some organizations might think they have to change totally. That isn’t being audience-centered; that’s being faddish and unsustainable.  

If your metric is more people in the door, you might be tempted to completely twist and transform yourself in a brazen attempt to get people in.  Here is one failure I remember from my early days of audience-centered. When I ran an adult studios program, I started reading a great deal about the rise of craft culture (this was in the pre-Pinterest days). I ran scores and scores of classes, like purse-making and shoe-decorating. The classes sold, but it took me away from what was the real goal of our program, connecting people to collections through action. In that year, I raised enough money to completely cover my salary, but I didn’t actually grow our audiences. People took the class they wanted and left us. The program had shifted too far from the mission to keep people tethered to the organization. And, I was exhausted. After a great deal of consideration, I stripped the program of those ancillary classes. Profit decreased but repeat attendance increased. In the end, our organization for this model better for our visitors and our needs.

So how did I figure it out?

1.     I actually listened. I decided to talk to people. We did quick surveys and I did interviews. Then I demonstrated that I was hearing them but making some of the changes that were suggested.

2.     I tested the waters. I didn’t completely shift the program at once. I tried a few new things, and then asked people what they thought.

3.     I was willing to get it wrong and change. Visitors make a number of adaptations to come to us. Our hours, our rules, our spaces, all place restraints on visitors. If we’re asking them to change, we have to also make changes.

Museums often don’t have enough clout to be about to be community-centered or audience centered on their own. They often need to look to other fields (or other types of museums) for partners. One of my hardest projects was a museum-library partnership. As a lifelong library patron, I was thrilled about this partnership. While museums might be haven or destinations, libraries have always been a home to me. I walked into the project expecting synergy and rainbows. I was woefully wrong. What went awry? 

What did I learn: 

4.     Partners need to understand each other. We didn’t do our due diligence to understand the differences of norms. We didn’t articulate where our norms overlapped and where our goals connected. We didn’t give ourselves time to create a collective language.

5.     Partners need to plan together. Being transparent about goals is the first step, but then if you want to get to the end together, you have to chart a shared path. If you don’t, you’ll be met with many roadblocks.

6.     Partners need to share success. Success and credit are infinite properties. Hoarding them will not make you more successful and will devalue your future relationship with your partners. Find ways you can both benefit from success.

In summary, for me, being audience-centered is putting the people at the middle. Most of my points above might be summarized as: remember people matter; remember people have feelings; remember not to crush or ignore those feelings.

If you choose to focus on human-centered work, your organization will reap many benefits, including increased visitor engagement and attendance. But you need to increase internal capacity, including emotional intelligence and commitment to changing the means of work. The benefits certainly outweigh the investment, though. Human-centered is in essence letting the heart of your mission shine through the people of the museum.

I've written a bit more about audience engagement on my other blog, including co-creation and partnership. 

As always, tag me in your posts and shares so I can include you in my summary post at the end of the month (@artlust, @seemarao, @_art_lust_)

What is Audience Engagement?

Audience engagement is the easiest and hardest thing about our work.

Let’s start with the easy. We open our doors and let people in. We’ve done it for a couple hundred years. We understand things like door count and fire code. We get exhibitions and installations. We’re pretty good with time tickets. We’ve got casework and collection care sorted. Many of us spend some quality time getting good stuff on the walls. We’re doing our best.

But our best might be the challenge. Our best is defined within the norms of our field. Our best articles are the ones we define against what our other scholar friends are writing. Our definitions of the best exhibitions are either best for our field or what we think is best for our visitors.

And, before all my research and evaluation friends have an attack of “but wait!,” I will say that I’ve seen incredible changes in our field in my almost twenty years in. I’d guess these changes barely register for visitors. Why? Society is changing. T’was and always will, certainly. But the rate of change has been FAST. And our museum change rate is glacial. The clash is basically the thing that keeps museum leaders up at night.

How do we make the right changes to make the most of audience engagement given our museum culture? What changes to museum culture allow us to best grow audiences without destroying the best of our core competencies? How do we make the choices that will keep museums from going extinct? This last question isn’t hyperbolic. Audience engagement is part and parcel to the survival of our work. Our future isn’t promised. We make it.

So, this month, I ask you a few questions: What are the challenges in audience engagement? What are your successes? What are your hopes for the future?

Before we get to the work of discussing audience engagement, this week, let’s talk definitions. What is engagement?

I’ve been thinking recently about the words we use in our fields. We often preference words with nebulous and complicated meanings as a way of seeming “with the people.” Experience is one of my favorites, and not just because it’s my job. Experience is a word you might be able to feel and know, but it’s hard to pin down. What is not an experience? What is the metric of a good experience?

Experience and engagement are a bit linked. A good experience is usually engaging. Engaging is a word that overlaps welcoming, interesting, surprising, and audience-appropriate. Engaging and experience are absolutely in the eye of the beholder if you will. Death metal will not be engaging to me even if performed in the loveliest place on the planet by the loveliest people with the greatest visitor experience strategies. We all have things that no effort will sell. So, engagement is about connecting some people.

Engagement has grown in importance to museums because we feel like there must be more people who could feel connected to our organizations. On some level, that’s an assumption based on our own high opinion of ourselves. We believe we are awesome, so people should want to come. But one another level, it’s an admission of fault. We were doing engagement by just opening our doors. We’re pretty sure that’s the wrong way to do it. We know empty galleries aren’t the point of our work. And, we know we need to do better.

But, herein lies the challenge. What does audience engagement mean? To me, it means transformation. It means every little part of our work. It’s about systems. Digital, parking, signage, board relations, everything is about transforming our work.

People are at the definition of engagement to me. It’s a word that stands in for all the efforts we make to connect people to collections. (I talked about all the people last week).   

Next week, I’ll talk about some of my audience engagement including a couple failures. B/c failure is about learning.

In the meantime, how do you define audience engagement?

As always, tag me in your posts and shares so I can include you in my summary post at the end of the month (@artlust, @seemarao, @_art_lust_)

Museum Verbs and Defining Who are We.

After the International Committee on Museums spent some time debating the definition of museums, many folks took up the charge on social media to give their own definitions. I’m inviting people to share their definitions, here and on social (and tag me); I’ll summarize your thoughts next week.

We need new #MuseumVerbs. Let me suggest one to start us off:

Let go.

There must be others. What are they?#ICOM2019 #ICOMKyoto2019

— Dan Hicks (@profdanhicks) September 7, 2019

But this week I want to focus on a tweet by Dan Hicks who suggested instead of a definition we need museum verbs. The invocation was an important one. We’re in a moment in our field where we’ve spent a few decades becoming interactive. The ice cream museums of the world couldn’t have existed if the Exploratorium, Boston Science, Imperial War Museum, Please Touch hadn’t innovated interaction very early. (I know I’m missing early innovators of interaction in museums; feel free to tell me who in the comments.) While a social media-focused museum can be a lightning rod for us in this field, their existence highlights the fact that a big sector of our visitors and potential visitors sees museums as a place where you “do something.”

One might argue “see something” is a verb. “Just looking at things” is a common complaint about museums, often being paired “it’s boring.” It’s interesting because watching sporting events is a common American pastime. Certainly, ball games are places where you sit, something that’s barely even odds in museum galleries, and you get to drink beer while watching the main event. But I think the big difference in sports is that people know what to look for. Very few Americans don’t know what a home run is. You might not be clear on the rules for penalties, but if you went to a game you be able to say the team got the point. For museums, we often want museum to use the verb “look”  but we don’t tell them what to look for. I also think about diving at the Olympics. I don’t enjoy swimming in pools or anything that seems like exercise; I have definitely never done a flip off the high dive. But one time I watched the Olympics with a family member who dove for his college team. After 15 minutes, I felt I had enough knowledge to enjoy watching. As sports shows, some of the onboarding might come from the culture overall, or might just need a 15-minute conversation, but with that knowledge you become an engaged viewer.

The power of a little knowledge is one of the reasons interactives matter. I’m not well-versed in dinos. On a recentish trip to the American Museum of Natural History, I watched a group of unrelated people learn about the parts of a T Rex by putting together a puzzle. I’d guess the VR in the next room cost a whole lot more money (and it was fun), but even simple interactives empower people to know what to look for. Our visitors see and do in our galleries. Fostering these engagements with ideas and collections is key to our work.

What are the other verbs that highlight our raison d’etre? Teach is a big one. As a field, we have some mixed feelings on this, I think. We love when we teach with a capital T, like exhibitions and university classes. We also love the school tours, when we’re doing the annual reports and pitching program support to bankers. At the same time, we often pay educators less while expecting more. We often think of our teachers as being less than classroom teachers and our gallery staff as “just” teaching little kids. We even step away from the word education in general by changing departments to “interpretation,” as if using a fancier word will give the work more clout. As a field, we are proud of the verb teach when it is either prestigious or profitable, but otherwise we’re more ambivalent. Teaching is a core. It is extremely hard to teach humans, in general, and it is progressively harder to teach them the younger they go. If you don’t believe this, engage toddlers with Sol LeWitt, and tell me how you survived. Specialized teaching is an extremely important part of our sector, and something we should herald.

Seeing and teaching are verbs that connect to collections. But what verbs are bigger than the collection? In the states, the mall is in decline. Museums, many of whom are free at least once a week, are in possession, collectively, of huge areas of interior space. In the frozen winters of the north and the soul-sucking dry heat of the southwest, and every other climate in between, museums can come up with many verbs for our communities. We are spaces and places. These are nouns, sure. But we can use these nouns for people. After all, we’ve been using our collections, nouns all, to do good for people for a couple hundred years. They can convene, they can invite, they can ignite partnerships, they can allow, they can encourage, they can transform.

Museum verbs are only bound by us. Our traditions have given us a few verbs. Our innovators in the last couple decades have given us more. But what is the future of what we do as a field? We are the ones who decide. We are the ones who pick the verbs that ensure museums exist for posterity. So, what are your museum verbs?

Share your thoughts and your thoughts about the definitions of museums, either here or on social. Remember to tag me so I can reshare with our readers (@artlust, @seemarao, @_art_lust_)

Also, I wanted to note a couple awesome posts to read: JasperVisser’s take and Linda Norris’ post.

Who are we, museums?

This month, I want to ask us this question. As a field, who are we?

I have been thinking about this question at work for the past few weeks. I had started a rapid research experiment recently. I invite the whole staff to my office anytime between 2-3 on Tuesdays to answer one question. They get a cookie, and leave their desks for 15 minutes, interact with colleagues from outside their silo, and I get a bit more insight as we build our audience engagement plan. Most weeks, people give me great surprises. But, recently, one of my colleagues, a man with an impressive assortment of checked shirts that I consistently envy, said, “I think we can’t do this until we decide who we are.” It was one of those record-scratches-to-a-stop moments. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Then, I get home, confined to the couch with a terrible sinus headache, to find ICOM was debating the definition of a museum. A different sort of ache began. ICOM matters because museums are a global phenomenon. Is there a country without at least one? Over the years, I’ve enjoyed interacting with all the international museum folks at conferences, particularly at AAM. From those scant moments, I’ve garnered that, like many things, the happenings in America are different than those in the world. ICOM might not seem to matter to our workdays in American museums, but it does matter global. Why? For me, it is a sign at a high-level of what bureaucracy of our field thinks.

I have many thoughts about the ICOM definitions. Procedurally, I worry that many of the people leading this debate are not well-verse in practice (thanks for that clarification Suse Anderson) or in what visitors think. Good leadership is informed by others and on behalf of others. It is not deciding what is in your own best interest. Sure, some of the people working on the definition have been informed. But I’d love transparency on the ways that the ICOM delegates prepared for their role defining museums. As as Katie Eagleton brought up, who is this definition for? 

I’m particularly interested in the ways that the possible definitions by ICOM relate to the ways the people of those nations define museums. Susan Spero brought up a good point. Our field is more than casual observers see us, and our future requires us to go beyond the assumptions people make of museums. Absolutely. Tony Butler offers a publication that also resonated with Susan’s point. Both of these issues are important. People can only define museums on what we have now. We as professionals get to define museums on the future we will make.

But the gaps between the ICOM definitions and their people’s/ visitor’s definitions would be telling. Do these gaps happen because we have forward-looking, visitor-centered leaders? Or do we have these gaps because our leaders are not grounded in visitors or practice? The former is my hope, and I’m sure some of the people at ICOM qualify in this group. My fear is the latter is all too common, and I know some of the ICOM definitions reeked of naval-gazing, esoteric stupidity, and backward thought.

Why does it matter to get a definition? Or does it? I don’t know. I do think a good definition is a good way to show funders and foundations our collective vision of the field. I also think when museums are taxed, and in countries with different norms for museums, the definition can be a positive way to shine a light on the best path. But with all unfunded mandates, people are not being compensated to change. Should they? The status quo is the path already cleared. Many people on Twitter talked about how our actions as a field are a better definition of the future than any word salad a committee can produce.

But I’m curious: Who are we, museums? (As Sarah May said, we might ask, who is a museum? Who is it for?) 

I’d love every answer and all answers. In many ways, our discussions are the most essential way to move forward. ICOM would be well-served by invited huge digital debate by museums folks and the folks who go to museums, by then inviting thinkers to synthesize these thoughts, and then use that to make something worth voting yes for.

I’ll summarize your answers at the end of the month.

Please share, talk, and tell me. Tag me when you share (@artlust, @seemarao, @_art_lust_)

For your enjoyment, the ICOM definitionish:

Session 5 Doshisha University: Towards a new museum definition. Here is a chart as to how many times specific concepts appear in the 269 answers and are included in the new definition proposal #ICOMKyoto2019 #ICOFOM pic.twitter.com/eM25O6FDha

— Museum Studies Hel (@MusStudiesHel) September 5, 2019

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Also, I'll put in a plug for my Medium post this week. I don't write there often, just when something feels important. It's an ode to my colleagues.