A Series of Epistolary Romances (the CODE|WORDS experiment continues)

Late last week, we quietly announced that CODE|WORDS–the experiment in online discourse that Ed Rodley, Rob Stein, and I kicked off in 2014–is back. It has a new format and a new set of instigators, plus new authors and new topics. I’m happy to see its return.

When we started CODE|WORDS, our aims were to pilot a new approach to the creation of theory ‘in public’ through the use of online, collaborative platforms, with a print publication to follow. We hoped the project would offer considered commentary as well as responsive dialogue, but the format we chose enabled less discourse than intended.

Which brings us to A Series of Epistolary Romances... Our second CODE|WORDS experiment is designed to privilege the discursive, conversational element that the original project was unable to generate. Each month, a new pair of authors will correspond about a topic related to museums for a series of weeks (or longer, if they choose). Ideally, this approach will allow us to investigate how a discussion rolls out over time, and to see how a more personal approach to correspondence impacts a dialogue. We’re also interested in learning how people play with the epistolary format. Will all posts be long form communications, or will we get videos, audio notes, or scans of postcards and letters?

Our first romance is between Bruce Wyman and Daniel Meyers, and investigates Interstitial Spaces in Museums. Already, there are wonderful moments.

From Bruce:

I had fallen in love with the early work of Imagineering and the early planning of Disneyland and Disney World. The early imagineers had made *amazing* experiences and it was all this attention to detail and thinking through what the overall experience of a thing would be. And it wasn’t just superficial treatment, but every component that would touch the visitor. I read everything I could about those design sessions and development and reveled in their tweaks and tricks to add just 10% more magic to every experience.

To which Daniel replies:

But I have to tell you, my first experiences of Disney attractions were profoundly disappointing! Perhaps it was just a failure of my imagination, but even as a youngster I found myself unable to suspend disbelief. Rather than feeling immersed in story, I was interested in understanding the mechanisms behind the silicone curtain, as a way to pass the time.

I love these personal explorations of bigger ideas related to museums and technology, and can’t wait to see how this format shifts the tone of the conversation.

Do you want to get involved with CODE | WORDS? Sign up and register interest in being one of our contributors. Think about the topics you’d like to cover, and the person you’d like to talk to, and one of our instigators will get back to you soon.

Engagement analytics and lifelong engagement in museums

Does a repeat visitor to your museum have more value than a unique visitor? How often does someone have to visit your museum to be considered loyal or ‘repeat’? How do you know whether people are engaged with your museum? These are questions I’ve been thinking about since visiting Dallas back in April (this year is flying), and learning more about DMA Friends, the Dallas Museum of Art’s newly-launched free membership program. The program – which everyone who comes to the museum is invited to join – launched in January, coinciding with the DMA’s move to free entry.

Once signed up to the program, Friends start accruing points and badges in the museum by logging their activities – which galleries they visit, which programming they participate in – via SMS or at dedicated logging stations. Once acquired, the points can be redeemed for rewards like free parking, discounts in the shop or even (at the higher levels) qualifying to spend a night in the museum. In Nina Simon’s 2008 post on modelling repeat visitation, she talks about the importance of rewarding repeat business and letting people know you appreciate them, which is precisely what DMA Friends does. You can learn a bit more about it in the video below.

In exchange for giving away membership, the DMA gets something super valuable… information. The Friends program offers the DMA the capacity to learn more about existing visitors, identify potential new audiences, and make stronger connections with niche and micro-communities (like those who always come for particular types of events). As more and more people opt into the program, the DMA will have opportunities for understanding their visitors and the ways in which they engage with the museum at a scale that seems unprecedented for museum visitor research (please correct me if I’m wrong on that last point). And knowing this kind of detailed information about visitors and their visiting habits opens new windows for thinking about destination loyalty and the sustainability of the museum’s offerings.

What we’re ultimately talking about is engagement analytics
Consider the bank of information that the DMA will have on its visitors over the course of several years. How closely does repeat visitation tie to demographic proximity to the museum? How do you define a repeat visitor? Is someone who visits every year – but only once a year – a repeat visitor? What is the value of their engagement with the museum? How might you get them to increase their visits to twice a year? These visitors who are regular-but-not-frequent visitors might be an interesting place to start when thinking about trying to increase visitation, even though it will take some time to gather the initial data and establish those visitation patterns.

DMA Friends also makes it possible for the DMA to think about individual visitor behaviour and lifetime visitor behaviour. What happens when we start judging success as being about lifetime engagement rather than just numbers in the door? The scale and possible granularity of that measurement is staggering. In DMA Director Maxwell Anderson’s important 2004 paper on The Metrics of Success in Art Museums (PDF), Anderson writes that the first metric of success that museums should be pursuing is measuring the quality of the visitor’s experience.

A museum’s responsibilities to its public are many, and its success in fulfilling them is notoriously hard to quantify. The correspondence of visitor demographics with the demographics of the local population would be useful in pursuing a more representative result. One could continue not with the number of members but with the average number of visits by its members. As opposed to attendance, it would be useful to know the number of visitors who paid full or discounted admission to the permanent collection or special exhibitions. If the museum has no admission charge, then the number of visitors to the galleries (as opposed to the lobby, restaurant, gift shop, or party spaces) would be revelatory. The average length of a museum Website visit and the number of hours that galleries are open to the public are also indicators of success in the quality of the experience offered.

Running through this criteria, it strikes me that DMA Friends offers precisely the opportunities that Anderson was looking for when proposing these metrics almost a decade ago. The program will enable the Museum to see the correspondence between visitor and population demographics; to understand average visitation rather than just total visitation; to see how many visitors go into the galleries and which galleries they visit; and maybe even indications of how long a visitor spends on campus.

In addition, having this kind of information about visitors will allow the Museum to tailor specific experiences for Friends. In the paper Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman wrote on DMA Friends for Museums and the Web, the authors discuss ways that this might play out:

As visitors engage, new patterns quickly emerge showing how visitors use the museum and what sorts of programs are most valued. Ultimately, this pattern of data collection will allow more spontaneous types of programming, almost akin to a game of pick-up basketball: for example, a spur-of-the-moment docent tour around a critical mass of self-identified enthusiasts appearing in the same place at the same time.

Awesome right?!

But we’re not quite there, yet…
For all this potential awesomeness, there are a few things in the current execution of DMA Friends that prevent it from realising some of these longer term ambitions just yet. The first is that, as an international visitor with only limited phone use whilst in the States, I was never going to use the SMS codes to log my Friends points. That’s not a problem in and of itself. I could (and did) use the logging stations. But I only did this at the end of my visit. This meant a couple of things. The first was that I had to record the SMS codes as I passed them to ensure I remembered them all. Not a major pain, but a little one. It also meant that all the numbers I was plugging into the station came at once, so the Museum doesn’t really have a sense of my movements through the museum, like when I moved into each space and how long I took. It also means that, if other visitors are like me, then the idea of running a spontaneous tour for DMA Friends could actually be more irritating than awesome, if I was contacted minutes after I’d left the DMA, rather than in the minutes after I’d arrived. None of these are critical issues. They are just opportunities for further developing the concept in future iterations.

The badging system, which Elizabeth Merritt has touched on, also offers a lot of potential that isn’t being fully realised yet. Because the badges aren’t tied to earning particular rewards (although they do garner the visitor additional points) and there is no social component or way to share and show how many badges someone has earned – or compete against others for rare badges – I don’t think the badges are all that compelling right now. I do see opportunities with the badging program along the social dimension once they are sharable on social media, particularly if there is a competitive element – can someone be the Mayor of the European Art Gallery if they attend it more than anyone else? Would there be those who might compete for the honour of being at the Museum the most?

What I do love about the badges in their current state is the way Maxwell Anderson ties them to self-identification by visitors, in this interview. He says:

The one feature that I’m equally interested in is that people change. Their motivations change in the course of their lives or even their visit. So I think that it’s important to be flexible in presuming why somebody showed up and what they’re expecting to happen when they get here. That’s why [DMA Deputy Director] Rob Stein’s premise of badges has you self-identifying in as many ways as you want: a “sleuth,” you know, a “creative cat,” all these phrases that are tongue-in-cheek. And they’re meant to give people license to self-identify in a constellation of ways. And it’s playful, but it’s also, it gives us some clarity about why people are here.

The idea that visitors change over their visit, and particularly over their lifetime – and that it might be possible to track and tailor experiences to those visitors over that long period – fascinates me. Moves like this one by the DMA should prompt museums to think further about how they can measure and understand those changes, and use those measurements to provide more meaningful experiences for participants throughout their lives. What happens when we start thinking about the engagement visitors could have with our institutions as being (measurably) lifelong engagement?

What do you think about this kind of approach to membership and engagement? How might understanding the way your visitors engage with your museum over the course of their lifetime change the way you think about your work?

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…

One of my favourite moments at Museums and the Web 2013 was the closing plenary. Being invited to talk about museums and immersive theatre (well, really about Sleep No More) with Seb Chan, Ed Rodley and Diane Borger, producer of Sleep No More was kind of incredible. As a group, Seb, Ed and I had been trying to have a conversation about that topic for months (we had squeezed in a Google hangout previously), so to get the opportunity to delve more deeply into the issues was golden. It was also a fairly significant moment to be a part of; when a closing plenary of a museum conference that is ostensibly about the web has very little to do with technology or the Internet at all.

I’ve long been more interested in the implications of technology – in what it actually allows you to do, or how it allows you to rethink and solve problems in new ways – than in the technology itself. It’s one reason why I really interested in the DMA Friends program that Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman gave a paper on whilst at MW2013. DMA Friends is a new kind of membership program for the Dallas Museum of Art that let’s anyone sign on to become a member or Friend of the museum for free. It’s inception coincided with a move towards making admission to the Museum free as well, and has been accompanied by other changes at the Museum, like ensuring that floor staff act more like guides than guards (more on this in coming posts).

As Friends sign up or move around the Museum, they have the opportunity to collect and log codes for places they’ve been, activities they’ve done, or events they’ve attended, earning points that grant them access to specific rewards. So the visitors get a gift back from the museum for their visit (like free parking or a discount in the museum shop). It also means that the DMA is collecting quite granular information about specific guests; about what they are interested in, where they come from, and how often they attend the museum. This offers great potential for understanding your museum’s audience profile, particularly when you start to link it to programs and interests.

But it’s also interesting in terms of the possibilities for personalising communications and even programs to particular individuals who are regular – or irregular – guests of the museum. As Rob and Bruce note in their paper (emphasis added):

visitors can claim a variety of rewards created by the DMA to say “thank you” for participating with the museum. These rewards include traditional membership benefits, such as free parking and special exhibition tickets, as well as special and boutique rewards like behind-the-scenes access to staff and areas of the museum not generally seen by the public. One of the underlying goals of the program is to create long-term relationships with visitors while offering them value and benefits tailored to their experience and engagement with the museum. This long-term connection and repeat participation is seen as key to establishing the hoped-for relevance of the museum in the lives of visitors.

So what does this have to do with Sleep No More and immersive theatre? Well, I’m in New York for a few days this week, and so I’m going back to see/experience SNM for the second time. Two days ago, the day after I booked my ticket, I received this email communicae:

DEAREST-
AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT, I AM HOSTING A DINNER PARTY ON THE NIGHT 
OF YOUR STAY AT THE MCKITTRICK HOTEL, AND I WOULD BE HONOURED TO HAVE THE 
PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY. WE ARE CELEBRATING THE ARRIVAL OF A VERY 
SPECIAL GUEST WHOM I WOULD LIKE YOU TO MEET.

THIS WILL BE AN INTIMATE AFFAIR - VERY FEW GUESTS WILL BE GUARANTEED A 
SEAT AT THE TABLE.

Now I don’t know whether every guest who had registered to see Sleep No More tonight received this email, or whether a little flag went up in the SNM database next to my name/email address that noted that I had been to the performance before and therefore would be a likely candidate for this kind of ~~upselling~~ experience. But either way, it suckered me in (let’s call my attendance “research”), and I don’t think it would have had I not already engaged with the performance. I don’t think it would have mattered to me that I would get to go to an “intimate gathering in an undisclosed area of the hotel that a majority of guests will not have the opportunity to experience” if I had not already explored the hotel; if I didn’t already have stories of the event to share that I would enjoy adding to.

And this is one of the things that I think is hugely interesting about DMA Friends, and this approach to membership. Information is power. Getting to know your guests, to learn their attendance patterns and what they like, and then being able to offer them something special based on those preferences, offers some unique possibilities about how you can engage with your most engaged. About turning fans into superfans.

I spent last week at the DMA, so I have much more to write on this topic. But when we think about what museums can learn from immersive theatre, one simple thing might be that theatrical performances generally require bookings, and that gives you a little opportunity to learn something about your audience, and that creates opportunities of its own. It’s interesting to think of ways in which museums can do the same.

What do you think?