What a Visitor Survey Can’t Decide for Your Museum

Every museum makes choices about how it wants to treat the people who walk through the door. In dozens of small moments, it leans one way or another: toward provoking a visitor or reassuring them, stimulating them or calming them. Choices like these are about identity, and identity isn’t something a survey can hand you. A survey can help you understand whether the experience you built resonates. It can’t tell you which experience to build.

I don’t know why museums often avoid these kinds of choices. I suspect part of it is that leaders believe these questions are outside their purview. Or maybe it’s just that these choices can fall in the gap between curatorial and operational, so no one owns them. It’s true that there’s a craft dimension to how the institution supports or “engages” its users, but the nature of any offering is fundamentally about who you are, or who you want to be for your communities. Reaching for more data to fill the void is a technical fix for something technique can’t settle. If the experts creating the content and experiences don’t have a shared understanding of the organization’s strategic posture, they’ll fall back on opinion or endlessly circle data, looking for answers in the tea leaves.

That isn’t to say these choices have to be prescribed or that leaders need to become micromanagers, but tensions need to be named, and people should have heuristics to lean on. Are we the type of institution that challenges visitors more often than not? Or is this a place people should come to feel relaxed or stimulated? Are we the museum where people’s beliefs are affirmed, or are we the place where people discover something new about themselves? You don’t have to be just one thing to everyone, but knowing your defaults is a gift to your staff.

Staff may choose to carve out exceptions or test the answers to these questions, but claiming a default position — even if only temporarily, as an experiment — is empowering for the experts who make these choices every day. An institution that has decided to be a place that provides challenging, provocative experiences for the community is a place where designers, educators, and others can go off the rails with intention. Staff can then say, “We know that we’re a place that challenges visitors, but for this particular experience, that feels wrong, so we’ll diverge from the strategy, collect data that will tell us whether we need to shift course, and revisit the choice based on what we learn.”

But that’s not what happens at most museums. Leadership believes their work is about the usual suspects — fundraising, budgeting, and putting out fires. When no one has decided what outcomes the museum aims to support, staff are adrift. Every day, they have to start from scratch. Should we be this or should we be that? It’s a recipe for burnout.

Data can test whether the choice you’ve made is producing the outcomes you intended. It can’t choose for you. A chosen posture gives every finding a referent: a reason this number matters and that one doesn’t. Without that kind of anchor, research just generates more discussion. It feeds uncertainty rather than reducing it.

Over a longer horizon, though, choices do emerge from data. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but learning is a loop, not a straight line. A healthy organization keeps cycling between the posture it has chosen and what the evidence shows, and after enough turns, it's hard to say whether a shift came from the team or the data. It’s usually both. Falk’s Value Realization Cycle and Randi Korn’s Intentional Practice both map that loop.

Choosing an experiential posture doesn’t mean staff can’t make contrary choices. It only means that if and when they do make a contrary choice, there’s a speed bump in place that says, “Interesting choice — you’re free to make it; you know your work. Just decide up front what evidence would tell you whether the divergence actually beat the strategy.” It’s a capability-building attitude that reassures those who need reassurance (you don’t have to choose the hard path) and challenges those who appreciate a challenge (go for it, if you think you’re up for the job).¹

A museum’s strategic plan could be a resource for staff looking for a way to make these kinds of choices. Unfortunately, most strategic plans are full of goals and silent on posture — page after page about deepening engagement, and little about the specific value the museum provides. A plan that’s all goals and no strategy doesn’t settle who the museum is for. It just leaves that choice to be made further down, one decision at a time, by whoever’s closest to the visitor.

We’re working through that with a museum on its strategic plan right now: what do we actually offer the people we serve? Our Outcomes Assessment is how we surface it. How does your museum figure out these choices? Let me know in a reply to today’s letter.

Kyle