Audience centred purpose — what do i mean and how can you do it?
I’m obsessed with this, despite leaving the sector for a new role. So, here’s my last ranty personal perspective / helpful insight [delete as appropriate].
Museums (galleries, heritage spaces etc) exists to have a range of beneficial impacts on people, now and in the future. These include entertainment, education, financial return via tourism, academic research etc. These are all benefits, or ‘impacts’ on the people who fund them through taxation and patronage. Some are overt and contemporary (a nice day out), and some are less tangible (repository of shared memories). But everything a GLAM does can be conceptualised this way.
And yet. We tend to conceptualise project goals in line with numerical KPIs, curatorial desires and financial sustainability. These are all inward-looking targets — in which the benefits to publics are assumed. We then write advocacy pieces and funding proposals in which we retrofit benefits: ‘thousands of schoolchildren learned about ___’.
These benefits occur, but I contend we should do better at defining them, delivering them, then proving that we have delivered them. This will enable us to deliver greater value to our audiences, and also to better evidence our value to publics, governments and funders.
What’s in the way? Well, audience centred purpose is in fundamental opposition to the role of the expert.
Dominant underlying method — history and cultural assumptions
This is fundamentally bad, despite its prevalence. It’s the remaining old-school construct in our modernising sector. It builds in ‘objects’ or ‘works’ as the primary conveyor of meaning and value. It places the public as passive recipients. It places the ‘chooser’ as the primary role and everyone else as deliverers.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. The above model can be right more often than that. But it is just not good enough. Creativity (that is, consistent brilliance, over multiple projects and years) is delivered better by enabled collectives than individuals.
Objects are mute to many. Evaluation tells us a rich mix of object, stories and media work better. So we brought in this notion of ‘Experience’
Current ‘underlying + experience’ model
Notice how it is essentially exactly the same. The experiential aspects of these new hybrids are often digital or somehow un-object. There’s a sleight of hand here; an underlying object primacy and a division of labour (the choosers write the words, the digital gurus make the projected lightshow) that maintains the Fancy Choosing as the prime directive.
The model hasn’t changed. Some icing has been added to the cake.
I’d rather start from thinking, a museum’s purpose is to enrich lives. They do that by enhancing people’s knowledge, emotions or social behaviours. Don’t overthink it; there are way too many methods for defining literacies and impacts etc. and finding ‘the right one’ is a dead end.
Future — better practice
Why aren’t we here yet? It requires the Old Gods of Fancy Choosing to let go of the pen. For the organisation to see marketing and audience research as more than product sales. To develop team accountabilities for delivering for audiences, not incentivizing solo delivering for me to win an award, speak at the conference, or get that write-up in the specialist journal of choice.
And it requires an attitude shift from leadership. First, to a producer/product manager approach — fluid, recursive, enabling — rather than a project management rigidity of controlling a one-way flow. Second, to the role of Creative Direction shifting to a position of humility and team enabling rather than a yes/no sign-off.
(By the way, we’ll recognise this has happened when thank-you speeches and awards credit simply The Team rather than this actual quote from a museum CEO: The Curator, [name redacted], The Designer, [name redacted], oh yeah, and all the rest of the team)
OK, How? There isn’t a right answer, just an endless possibility to make slightly better answers than yesterday. Assuming first that there is ongoing audience research that is shared (such as quarterly surveys) and that internal teams talk to each other (designers talk to front-of-house staff, for example), I’d set different project types up like this
So, audience research is part of the mix. It’s not a veto or an approval gateway. It’s insight to help teams make better decisions. A project team with diverse experience brings judgement to bear upon their work. This is not the same as slavishly following audience research. It also is not summarily ignoring it because ‘we know what to do’.
I am supremely hopeful of the next generation of museum professionals. While so many museum studies courses are still steeped in Fancy Choosing, our culture is defaulting to collective, recursive and adaptive ways of working and that’s more important in shaping our working lives.
I am inspired by the museum staff to come, the leaders currently being shaped by their first few projects. My plea to emerging leaders: don’t imbibe toxic legacies of authoritative solo authorship but trust that you’ve got this, your way.
OK, that’s my last words on audience-centred purpose in museums. You can all ignore this buzzing mosquito now ;)
