The Invisible Audience
We museum folk spend a lot of time courting, cultivating, and analyzing our audiences.
We ply donors with wine and canapés. We win locals over with free admission days. We tempt members with behind-the-scenes tours. We appeal to teachers with professional development workshops. We host late-night dance parties for Millennials. We dazzle children with new technology and hands-on activities.
We create audience funnels, impact matrices, engagement ladders. We conduct surveys, collect demographic data, and pore over admissions numbers.
But what have we done for us lately? Where, in all of this frenzy over audiences, do museum staff fit in?
According to the American Alliance of Museums, museums employ over 400,000 people in the United States. Relatively speaking, this is not a huge number, but these human resources are the heart of our success and a source of tremendous potential.
Who among us does not know someone who lives and breathes our organization’s mission? Someone who puts in extra hours, extra thought, extra effort to make their museum a better place? Someone whose infectious fandom — while at times annoying — is the most fundamental asset our museum can acquire?
But I also suspect most of us have seen a museum employee burn out, under-appreciated and unseen. They start out energetic and enthusiastic, trying to accomplish ambitious goals, question the status quo, and lobby for new opportunities. How long does it take before that person becomes jaded? How long before they realize they could be making twice as much working in the private sector? What can we do to cultivate them and make them feel valued?
We need to invest in ourselves.
Whether at individual institutions, in partnership with others, or as a museum community we need to start seeing museum staff as an untapped, coveted audience and treat ourselves accordingly. Here are a few things we can do:
Commit to providing professional development options at all levels and across all departments. This could come in the form of funding for conferences, workshops, or online courses. Alternatively, it could come in the form of time granted to pursue extracurricular activities — volunteering, mentoring, visiting other museums — on the clock. What matters is the sense that our institutions are investing in us and our skills.
Create opportunities for us to teach each other. We’re pretty smart people. But particularly at larger museums, we don’t always get a chance to interact with and learn from staff in other departments. These opportunities needn’t be formal: Give behind-the-scenes tours of the membership desk; walk docents through the collections vault; let curators play with the latest VR technology. What matters is our strengthened connections with each other and each others’ work.
Learn how to more effectively manage change in our organizations. Museums are known for being more deliberative than impulsive — and that’s okay. Certainly we don’t want to pursue change for change’s sake. But getting stuck in the patterns of the past is dangerous: we risk losing our relevance or missing out on key opportunities. Leadership in particular needs to be able to deal with (and even embrace) the discomfort of change, and help others adapt more smoothly.
Provide more free food. Nothing kills morale like a staff luncheon where they’ve chosen from the bottom of the internal catering menu. We see the leftovers from board meetings and it just doesn’t seem right. We don’t spend a lot of time socializing with one another, but when we do, we’d like to spend it complaining about the breakneck exhibition installation schedule, not the quality of the mini quiche.
Finally, let’s address this elephant in the room: funding, resources, budget, moolah. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow with a million more dollars in our coffers. Staff are a small group and, unlike high-end donors, we are not going to directly contribute to our bottom line in any significant way. But our contributions go beyond money; properly cultivated, we have the passion and depth of knowledge to change hundreds, thousands of our visitors.
What would it look like if we succeed in cultivating our own?
Ideally, we would have a more dynamic, diverse organizational culture and a happier, more stable workforce. But that’s not a guarantee. It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to become a superfan: Sometimes people will become “lifers” and sometimes they’ll move on. After all, there’s not always room for promotion from within. So why invest if they’re going to leave us anyway? Why pay more attention to the people we’re already paying?
In the long run, this kind of investment improves our reputation and strengthens our entire field. If we help someone become a better conservator / supervisor / writer / educator / researcher / preparator, and in the process create a big fan of museums and museum culture, what do we have to lose?
Only our most important audience.