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Delivering the Visitor Experience: part three

In the third and final exclusive extract from Rachel Mackay’s new book, she talks about Developing the Visitor Experience

Rachel Mackay

Blooloop is sharing exclusive extracts of a new book from Rachel Mackay entitled Delivering the Visitor Experience. The book discusses the process of delivering a visitor experience from beginning to end. In the first part, Mackay introduced the topic of Creating the Visitor Experience. In part two, she looked at a key aspect of Managing the Visitor Experience: motivating a team. Now, in the final extract, from the book’s section on Developing the Visitor Experience, Mackay will explore the topic of advocacy.

Developing the Visitor Experience

Delivering-the-Visitor-Experience-Rachel-Mackay visitor experience advocacy

In my experience, most people who have a passion for this sector don’t want to merely manage the status quo. We are constantly looking to evolve and develop the experiences we deliver, adapting and flexing to meet changing needs and trying new things to engage our visitors in different ways. Therefore, the final section of Delivering the Visitor Experience looks at the skills and tools we need to do exactly that. We’ll look at innovation, strategic planning, continuous professional development and change management.

In this extract, we’ll focus on advocacy. As Visitor Experience professionals, we rarely work in silos. We have interdependencies with other departments and must work with others to best serve the visitors. Therefore, if we want to develop and evolve our experiences, we must also become advocates for them. This extract explores some of the barriers to doing this. It includes a case study from the Mary Rose Museum to show how we can overcome those barriers in practice.  

Becoming advocates

In talking with colleagues in the Visitor Experience world, both in general and in researching this book, I have run into a common challenge: common enough to focus on it here.

To develop the visitor experience, it’s really important that within our organisations we act as effective advocates for the visitor experience, working alongside colleagues in other departments to deliver visitor-centred improvements.

And yet this isn’t always as simple as it sounds. Through conversations with others and my own experience, I know that there can often be barriers to effective advocacy.

Barriers to effective visitor experience advocacy

One of the most common barriers to visitor experience advocacy is the positioning of the responsible department within the organisation. The name given to what I would call the Visitor Experience team changes over time and across different organisations, as does where the department sits. I have seen it included as part of a wider Operations team, part of the Public Engagement team, part of the Learning team, part of the Marketing and Audience Development team, and part of the Commercial team. The list is endless.

art gallery tour guide with kids visitor experience advocacy

You might think this doesn’t matter. Visitor Experience teams have to work with everyone in the organisation to deliver the visitor offer. So, what does it matter where they sit?

Actually, I’ve found that it really does make a difference. In small or big museums, having a senior champion of visitor experience, whether that’s through management structure or through having a senior advocate at board level, will hugely impact how visitor-centric your organisation is, and how seriously the job of those in visitor-facing roles is taken. Job titles and organograms matter.

Job titles matter

If that sounds far-fetched, consider this example from someone I interviewed for this book (who I will keep anonymous for obvious reasons). This person told me the story of working in a large organisation where the operations team were called ‘custodians’. Meanwhile, other teams were known as the ‘professional’ staff. The professional staff even had a nickname for the staff on site: ‘donkeys’. As my source commented: ‘God, that wound me up. Everyone is professional!’

Two kids looking at a science exhibit visitor experience advocacy

This story took place some time ago, and I’m happy to say that, generally, things have moved on. Unfortunately, however, there are still some isolated examples across the sector where Visitor Experience is considered to be less of a specialism than other museum professions. I’ve certainly had experiences myself where I’ve felt I needed to get the backing of external consultants in order to have my views heard.

As frustrating as this can be, I think that the onus is on us Visitor Experience professionals to get our voices and specialist knowledge heard and listened to. Although it can be tempting to just blame organisational structure or culture, and give up, it might be more useful to consider how we can be such effective advocates that we cement our credibility and change the culture around us.

Are we communicating effectively?

Visitor research experts Ben Gammon and Jo Graham offer an interesting insight into this from their work at the Science Museum.

In their article Putting Value Back into Evaluation, they identify several barriers to effective audience advocacy. This includes management structure, stakeholder involvement and late evaluation. However, the authors also pose a new challenge: ‘Nobody has asked whether we the audience advocates are communicating effectively with our audience. Curators are people too, you know.’ i

science museum london

As Visitor Experience professionals we consider each communication with visitors extremely carefully. But do we always put the same thought into how we communicate with our internal stakeholders?

For example, Gammon and Graham use the example of sending through frequent, unwieldy visitor feedback reports and expecting internal teams to engage. ‘In our experience,’ they say, ‘the failure of exhibition teams to act on the advice of audience advocates is not necessarily due to their lack of interest or willingness, but because we are asking them to do what we would never expect out visitors to do – read, memorise and draw conclusions from vast quantities of text.’ ii

I think it’s important to acknowledge that not all of the barriers come from others not listening. Sometimes it’s about how we ourselves communicate. In fact, the case study below is a great example of delivering visitor awareness in a different way.

What are museums?

Another barrier to effective Visitor Experience advocacy goes to the very root of the most basic philosophical question: what should a museum be?

John Falk describes this in his article Museum Audiences: A Visitor-Centred Perspective. Talking about the age-old debate between the academic/conservation role and the public role of museums, he says ‘the debate around this question has often been shrill with much of the discussion simplistically framed as a dichotomy between “quality/education” and “quantity/entertainment”.’ iii

This argument can mean that when advocating for the needs of the visitor, we can face accusations of dumbing down ‘content in order to appeal to the masses’ and therefore sell tickets, or attract more visitors. It’s certainly an argument I am familiar with, as, I suspect are many of my colleagues in Visitor Experience.

However, Falk argues that this is the wrong debate. Both sides of the argument, he says, represent a ‘museum-centric’ mindset, one academic and one commercial. Instead, we should be aiming for a visitor-centric approach:

The visitor-centred perspective focuses on the users of museums – both current and potential; individuals who have no enduring financial or personal stake in the museum. It asks the question what is the perceived value of the museum to these individuals, those who visit and those who do not. In taking this perspective, the question becomes more about satisfaction than ‘outcomes’. iv

John Falk

How to deliver visitor-focused advocacy in practice?

So, how do we deliver visitor-focused advocacy in practice? My advice is to follow a three-step process:

  1. Legwork: Do the work, talk to people, research, and be active. Remember advocacy is a marathon, not a sprint. Start with an open mind, not a preconceived idea.
  2. Evidence: Build your case using pilots, trials, visitor research and examples from other sites.
  3. Coordinate: Once you have your team in place, step back and make sure there is a coordinated approach to solving the problem.

The case study below is a great example of this process in action. It explores how advocating for the visitor experience can drive changes, even to a brand-new museum.

Advocacy and change at the Mary Rose Museum

Paul Griffiths was brought in as head of operations at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth in 2012. Like the rest of the operations team, he arrived after the new museum, which opened in May 2013, had already been designed. This meant that, without a key person to advocate for the visitor experience, not everything about the new museum worked flawlessly. v

For example, the operation had launched with timed tickets to help manage capacity. Whilst this was no doubt a sensible move, there hadn’t been certainty about what the dwell time would be.

‘People were going in not realising they were going to be in there two or three hours’ Griffiths says. Then, when they did want to leave, the dark, immersive environment architects had created didn’t lend itself to wayfinding. So, when visitors realised they had been there longer than intended and did have to leave ‘. . . they couldn’t get out because it was dark and there was no obvious exit route.’

Another issue was the retail experience. In a scenario familiar to many operators, the shop had been designed by architects rather than retail experts. Full of low-level counters, with nothing at eye level, the shop just wasn’t appealing to visitors. It was not delivering the income that had been forecast.

These issues are problematic for any operation, but after a multi-million-pound relaunch, the appetite for further investment was low. Griffiths describes one of his biggest challenges as ‘convincing our CEO at the time that he needed to spend loads more money, when he’d just spent £35 million on a brand-new museum which had been designed by one of the most highly respected architects.’

Legwork, evidence, coordination

How did Griffiths advocate for the changes visitors needed? In order to influence internal colleagues, he did the legwork and gathered support and advice from across the sector:

‘From a retail perspective, we spoke to all sorts of retail experts, and we looked at best practice constantly’ he explains. ‘It was always about looking and then presenting back and saying, look, we’ve been to X, and this is what their shop looks like, and this is what they’re delivering in spend per head.’ Griffiths credits the sector for always being so quick to collude in what he jokingly refers to as ‘industrial espionage’. ‘People are so nice, so keen to share.’

To drive changes in wayfinding, Griffiths gathered evidence from the Museum’s visitors.

‘We used a lot of survey data, we were getting something like 100 forms done a week, so we were using that data. Visitor feedback was the key thing.’ Like Gammon and Graham at the Science Museum, however, Griffiths quickly realised that just handing over pages and pages of data wasn’t going to engage his colleagues. Instead, he sorted comments into Post-it notes, colour-coding them by theme.

Benefits of advocacy for the visitor experience

By presenting them in this way, colleagues could then see at a glance that signage and wayfinding was a key challenge for visitors:

‘They got it instantly.’ The museum made changes and introduced clearer wayfinding signage. Visitor feedback was also used to help phase out timed tickets and make the purchasing part of the visitor journey clearer.

Therefore, by going through those three phases; doing the legwork of learning from other organisations, gathering evidence from visitor feedback and coordinating a response from the management team, Griffiths was able to advocate for the visitor and improve the overall experience.

Now, as director of the historic Painshill Park in Surrey, Griffiths agrees that effective advocacy often depends on where organisations position Visitor Experience. It’s important to ‘have those advocates for the visitor experience at the centre of the organisation’ he says. ‘Today, as director, with my operations background, we have a Visitor Experience-focused lead for the organisation.’

To preorder Delivering the Visitor Experience: How to Create, Manage and Develop an Unforgettable Visitor Experience at Your Museum by Rachel Mackay, please click here. Customers in the US or Canada can pre-order from the ALA here and customers in New Zealand or Australia can pre-order from Routledge here. Blooloop readers can also save 25% on the paperback edition by entering the code VISITOR25.


Sources used in Delivering the Visitor Experience excerpt part three: Developing the Visitor Experience, advocacy

i Gammon, B. and Graham, J. (1998) Putting Value Back into Evaluation, Visitor Studies Today, 1, (6), 6–8.

ii Gammon, B. and Graham, J. (1998) Putting Value Back into Evaluation, Visitor Studies Today, 1, (6), 6–8.

iii Falk, J. H. (2016) Museum Audiences: A Visitor-Centred Perspective, Loisir et Société/Leisure and Society, 39 (3), 357–70.

iv Falk, J. H. (2016) Museum Audiences: A Visitor-Centred Perspective, Loisir et Société/Leisure and Society, 39 (3), 357–70.

v Griffiths, P. (2021) Interview conducted by the author, 12 January 2021.

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Rachel Mackay

Rachel Mackay is the head of Hampton Court Palace for Historic Royal Palaces, looking after operations and experience delivery at Henry VIII’s iconic pleasure palace. In 2020, she created The Recovery Room (therecoveryroomblog.com) to share research and resources as the museum sector recovers from the impact of the pandemic. Her first book, Delivering the Visitor Experience, was published in August 2023.

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