Auditing the visitor experience
Arts organizations are led and staffed by passionate insiders, which can leave them blind or blurry about everyone else.
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.
–Anais Nin, from Seduction of the Minotaur
One of the vexing challenges of producing and presenting creative work is that the work, itself, can pull so much focus. The professionals assembled are often there because of deep expertise and a lifelong passion for the art form. Further, the daunting scope and scale of creating something from nothing, using severely limited resources, can require all eyes and all hands just to make it to the day of show (or opening or exhibit or event).
The gathering of deep experts on a tight timeline with a constrained budget can leave consideration of the audience experience as an afterthought (“we’ll serve that constituency when we come to it”). As a result, insider experts can create experiences for other insider experts, hoping that a program note or a talkback will duct-tape the divide for everyone else.
That, of course, is not how the world works. In the real world, the power of an artistic work exists at the intersection of artistic expression and lived experience. This is not only true for the arts, but it is particularly true for the arts.
As Jim Kalbach describes it in his book on mapping customer experience (Kalbach 2021), this bias toward internal concerns is also observed across industries:
I’ve seen it over and over again: organizations get wrapped up in their own processes and forget to look at the markets they serve. Operational efficiency is prioritized over customer satisfaction. Many simply don’t know what their customers go through.
And because almost everyone in a leadership position at the organization is an insider (fully comfortable and confident in the conventions of the art form, the venue, and the social norms), you can brainstorm all day without ever getting to the insights you need. The insights you need are not in that room.
What’s required, early and often, is an intensive, outward-facing, evidence-based exploration of the audience experience – aka, a visitor experience audit.
Most will recognize the word “audit” from its annual financial meaning – an “official examination of accounts with verification by reference to witnesses and vouchers” (Oxford English Dictionary). And audit is a hearing, from the same root as auditorium and audition, but from an official and impartial judge.
A visitor experience audit doesn’t require a team of certified public accountants (CPAs) or a legal expert. But it does demand reliable and robust evidence beyond just speculation. As consultant Colin Mulberg describes it (2024):
A full Visitor Experience Audit explores the whole visitor journey, from when visitors are deciding to visit to when they arrive, what happens to them during their visit and all the way through to when they leave and afterwards.
So where do you gather the evidence you need for this audit? You ask people, for one. Ask visitors about their journey to your exhibit or performance or event – where it started, what constraints or connections they found along the way. Ask friends or colleagues who are unfamiliar with your work to seek out, select, and attend an offering and then reflect. Ask community members with unique perspectives and lived experience to visit and critique.
You can also analyze data, if you have it. Which pages on your website are the most active, what’s the path people take to actually commit to attend (and how many visitors make it through that path)? Where is your current audience situated across the community? What geographic areas are under- or over-represented?
The authors of Orchestrating Experience (Risdon and Quattlebaum 2018) suggest that you organize these insights across three categories:
Stages – “essentially chapters of the customer’s journey” from need identification to search to selection to purchase to approach to experience to departure to aftermath (or whatever stages make most sense for your audience’s journey).
Channels – the venues or platforms through which your audience engages with your work, including website, call center, mobile access, communications, marketing, and the venue itself.
Touchpoints – the actual interactions and connections between the audience and your organization, the fundamental building blocks of the audience journey. The full journey will include multiple touchpoints across multiple stages and through multiple channels.
From there, you can map the results in lots of useful ways: customer journey maps, service blueprints, experience maps, or mental model diagrams (Kalbach 2021). Or you can just share them in open and honest conversation with your team, your audience, your board, and your intended guests.
Arts experiences are often celebrated as empathy amplifiers – giving us a glimpse of the world through different eyes. The wise arts manager will build that capacity into their organization as well as encouraging it in their art.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Hosting & Guesting
Hosting involves inviting, greeting, and supporting those who enter your circle; Guesting includes acknowledging, honoring, and listening in the circles where you are a guest.
Framework of the Week: Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA)
The Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA) framework offers three ways to interrogate the actions or inactions of an individual or a group: motivation to achieve the intended action or outcome; opportunity provided (or blocked) by the external environment related to that action or outcome; and ability or internal capacity to accomplish the action or outcome.
Photo by iSAW Company on Unsplash
Sources
Kalbach, Jim. Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Customer Alignment through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams. 2nd edition. O’Reilly, 2021.
Mulberg, Colin. “Better Visits: Conducting a Visitor Experience Audit.” Museums + Heritage Advisor (blog), February 28, 2024.
Risdon, Chris, and Patrick Quattlebaum. Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity. 1st edition. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media, 2018.