Audience Research and Evaluation

How the Delaware Art Museum is Centering Community Voices in Interpretive Planning

By Amelia Wiggins

In 2018, the Delaware Art Museum (DelArt) began a radically inclusive approach to reinstallation planning, integrating community voices at every stage through focus groups, iterative prototyping, and community-created content. But before …
Virtual Programs for Children—What Do Parents Want Now?

By Scott Burg & Claire Quimby, Rockman et al.

After of year of chaos, anguish, and reflection, the world is entering a new phase—perhaps “post-pandemic,” maybe the “new normal”—it will take a while to settle on the right label. Last year, the AAM Committee on Audience Research and …
Empathy Interventions: Mia Experiments with Cultivating Empathy in Museum Visitors

By Alice Anderson & Karleen Gardner

Can the visual arts foster empathy and understanding? From our experiences as art museum educators, we believe they can, but there is little empirical research to support this theory. So, in 2017, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), …
Social Media Benchmarking: Evaluation Projects in Action at the Cleveland Museum of Art

By American Alliance of Museums

Watch this recorded webinar in which the Cleveland Museum of Art shares how they undertook a dedicated exploration into new metrics for social media benchmarking upon the museum’s temporary closure due to the pandemic in sp…
Essential Evaluators: Answering COVID Questions

By Laureen Trainer and Andréa Giron Mathern

Essential Evaluators seeks to gather evaluators in a common space to dialogue, reflect, and support each other in a world upended by COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. This is a time of uncertain and unknown expectations …
Using Local Data to More Fully Understand the Visitor Experience During COVID

By Kari Ross Nelson & Stephen Ashton, Ph.D.

At Thanksgiving Point Institute—a farm, garden, and museum complex in Lehi, Utah—we’ve been wondering how visitor agendas are changing during the current health crisis. Understanding visitor motivations informs our efforts to be inclusive …
Essential Evaluators: Let’s Keep Unlearning

By Laureen Trainer and Andréa Giron Mathern

Essential Evaluators seeks to gather evaluators in a common space to dialogue, reflect, and support each other in a world upended by COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. This is a time of uncertain and unknown expectations …
Measuring the Social Impact of Museums

By Michelle A. Mileham

At this pivotal time in history, advocating for museums, their staff, and their collections is more important than ever. To do that successfully, though, we need to be able to demonstrate impact on visitors and communities. But while we …
Evaluating the Impact of Augmented and Virtual Reality

By Colleen McGaughey & John Russick

“I am perfectly astonished at the effect.” “The thrilling scenes therein depicted are beyond description.” “It is true and really wonderful.” These are reactions from visitors to the Chicago Fire Cyclorama, who, in 1892, were captivated by …
Essential Evaluators: Digital Storytelling

By Laureen Trainer and Andréa Giron Mathern

Essential Evaluators seeks to gather evaluators in a common space to dialogue, reflect, and support each other in a world upended by COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. This is a time of uncertain and unknown expectations …